How the Practices Fit Together

One user, many practices

A sales manager cannot open the ordering system at 08:30. She calls the service desk. Within one hour, at least five practices of information technology service management (ITSM) touch her call. The service desk logs it. Incident management restores the system. Monitoring shows that a database ran out of space. Problem management later asks why nobody saw it coming. Change enablement approves the fix that adds capacity and an alert.

None of these practices works alone. Each one hands work and information to the others. When one of them is weak, the others carry extra load. A weak problem practice, for example, means the desk handles the same incident every month.

How the course is built

In this course you start with orientation and the foundations: services, value, roles and the service desk. Next come the three practices that carry most of the daily load: incident, problem and change. After that you study major incidents and continuity, then the "knowledge" practices: requests, knowledge, configuration and assets. Service levels, improvement and suppliers follow. The final module puts everything together in realistic cases.

Each module assumes you know the earlier ones. The level is intermediate. You are expected to apply the practices, choose between options and diagnose what is going wrong, not only to name things.

A second example: a new starter

A new engineer joins on Monday. Human resources raised a request two weeks earlier. Request fulfilment orders a laptop. Asset management records it against the engineer. Access management (often handled through requests) grants accounts. The service catalogue defines what a new starter receives. If the laptop arrives on Wednesday, the engineer loses two days. The fault may sit in any one of these practices, and usually sits at a handover between them.