15 ITIL best practices to implement in 2025

Consistent and reliable service delivery is an absolute must for businesses relying on IT to serve their employees. To help with these efforts, organizations are using information technology service management (ITSM) guidelines. These guidelines help create a structured system. One of the most popular of such guidelines is the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL).

With ITIL, you gain a set of tried-and-true best practices that help align technical services with broader business goals. An initial investment in ITIL tools and training is necessary. This investment leads to significant ROI through improved efficiency and lower maintenance fees.

Join us as we delve deeper into what ITIL is and the myriad benefits it can provide your organization.

What is ITIL?

ITIL is a set of best practices for IT service management that focuses on aligning technical services with the needs of your company. It offers a comprehensive framework for IT services. This includes identifying, planning, delivering, and supporting services to improve efficiency.

ITIL is organized into five core volumes. Each addresses a different aspect: service strategy, design, transition, operation, and continual service improvement (CSI).

What is ITIL 4?

ITIL 4 refers to the latest version of ITIL, building upon previous versions of the framework by incorporating best practices for managing and delivering IT services. It highlights service management that focuses on value. This means understanding and meeting user needs, not just technical goals.

ITIL 4 introduces the service value system (SVS). This provides a holistic approach to managing end-to-end services. SVS includes guiding principles, governance, continual improvement, and the service value chain.

A central theme of ITIL 4 is flexibility, as it integrates modern methodologies like Agile, DevOps, and Lean. This enables you to adapt to rapidly changing digital environments. By supporting a broad spectrum of processes, ITIL 4 empowers businesses to be more resilient. This ensures that IT services align with broader organizational goals with minimized inefficiencies.

Why are ITIL best practices important?

Providing IT professionals with a clear set of guidelines allows them to respond to incidents more systematically. With a clear plan, employees can easily identify the root causes of problems.

They can then take action to fix them and stop them from happening again. This organized method reduces service interruptions. It also helps your organization adjust to new technologies and changing business needs.

Additionally, ITIL's best practices framework emphasizes the importance of learning from past experiences and continuously refining processes to achieve better outcomes. By documenting best practices, organizations create a valuable knowledge base. This resource can train new employees, facilitate collaboration, and drive innovation.

Criteria for selecting ITIL best practices to focus on

Before implementing ITIL practices across your organization, understanding which ones to prioritize ensures optimal resource allocation and measurable impact.

Business alignment

The most effective ITIL practices directly support your organization's strategic objectives. Evaluate each practice against your current business goals. These might include improving satisfaction, reducing costs, or accelerating service delivery.

Organizational maturity level

Your current IT maturity determines which practices you can successfully implement. Organizations new to ITIL benefit from foundational practices. Start with incident management and service desk operations before advancing to complex implementations like service portfolio management. Assess your team's existing capabilities, available resources, and technical infrastructure to identify practices that match your readiness level.

Impact potential

Measure the potential impact each practice offers across multiple dimensions. Consider how implementation affects service quality, operational efficiency, and user satisfaction. Practices addressing your most significant pain points typically deliver faster returns.

Ease of adoption

Practices requiring minimal disruption to current operations while delivering substantial benefits often serve as ideal starting points. This approach builds momentum and demonstrates value before tackling more complex implementations.

Resource requirements

Consider staff availability, budget constraints, and technology capabilities when selecting practices. Starting with practices that leverage existing tools and skills accelerates adoption while minimizing initial investment.

15 ITIL best practices you need to prioritize

Business leaders will first need to conduct a thorough internal assessment when formulating a set of ITIL practices for their team to follow. Though these processes will vary from company to company, in general, some proven best practices in ITIL include:

1. Establish clear goals

Begin by connecting your organization's mission and vision to SMART goals. These specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives will guide all ITIL initiatives.

Engage stakeholders across departments during the goal-setting process. Input from various teams ensures objectives address real business needs. This collaborative approach builds organizational buy-in and verifies that goals support broader operational requirements.

Once established, communicate these objectives clearly throughout the organization. Create detailed implementation plans outlining necessary steps, assigning specific responsibilities, and establishing realistic timelines. Regular monitoring and reporting keep initiatives on track while enabling timely adjustments based on changing circumstances or emerging challenges.

2. Streamline service desk operations

Effective service desk operations require clear communication channels connecting IT teams with business units. Establish structured pathways for information flow that enable collaborative issue resolution while maintaining accountability. Implementing service-level management aligns service desk performance with stakeholder expectations by establishing agreed-upon standards.

Continuous training and development opportunities strengthen service desk capabilities. Regular sessions cover ITIL processes, emerging technologies, and essential soft skills. These prepare teams to handle diverse issues effectively through better communication and problem-solving. Cross-training staff across different areas creates versatile teams.

3. Optimize incident management

Prioritize disruptions based on business impact and urgency. This enables your service desk to address critical issues promptly while systematically managing less urgent matters. Automation tools manage simple tasks like ticket routing, status updates, and notifications. This allows staff to focus on more complex problems.

Continuous improvement drives incident management excellence. Conduct regular post-incident reviews to identify root causes and process improvement opportunities. Analytics tools measure performance through key indicators, including resolution times, incident volumes, and user satisfaction scores. This data-driven approach reveals patterns and trends that inform enhancements to your incident management framework.

4. Communicate ITIL value effectively

Explain clearly how ITIL processes simplify work and improve efficiency for your IT team. Involve team members in implementation planning and actively seek their feedback to foster ownership and engagement.

Share success stories regularly to reinforce ITIL's importance over time. Communicate key performance indicators demonstrating improvements in service quality and user satisfaction. Recognizing individual and team achievements related to ITIL implementation boosts morale and encourages sustained commitment to framework principles.

5. Centralize incidents and requests

Consolidating IT-related activities requires a unified service management platform. Comprehensive ITSM tools help manage incidents and fulfill requests. They collect and track all tickets in one location. This software should support automated workflows, intelligent categorization, and dynamic prioritization for efficient handling of different ticket types.

A centralized service desk serves as the primary interface between users and IT departments. This single point of contact maintains consistent communication and ensures uniform logging and tracking of all issues.

6. Integrate ITIL tools strategically

Successful tool integration centers around a robust ITSM platform with APIs and connectors enabling interoperability across systems.

A unified data model across platforms ensures consistent, accurate information sharing between tools and processes. This standardized structure reduces discrepancies and supports a single pane of glass for managing technical services. Centralized data provides IT teams with environmental visibility, enabling faster decision-making and more effective service delivery.

7. Empower users with self-service

Self-service portals enable users to log incidents, submit service requests, and track ticket status independently. These web-based interfaces streamline reporting processes while giving users greater control over their requests. This reduces service desk workload for routine inquiries.

Knowledge bases provide searchable repositories of articles, FAQs, and guides that help users find solutions to common problems independently. Step-by-step instructions and best practices documentation reduce ticket volume and improve user satisfaction.

8. Implement proactive risk management

Systematic risk management prevents incidents before they impact services. Regular risk assessments find possible threats in IT services. They look at how these threats might affect the services.

Then, they rank the threats by how likely they are and how serious they could be. This proactive approach enables teams to address vulnerabilities before they cause disruptions.

Robust change management procedures mitigate risks associated with system modifications. Conduct thorough impact assessments, create detailed risk mitigation plans, and ensure all stakeholders are prepared before implementing changes. This disciplined approach prevents incidents that could affect service availability or performance.

9. Leverage AI and automation

AI-powered tools and automation transform incident management efficiency. Intelligent chatbots handle routine inquiries and automatically log initial incidents. AI algorithms categorize and prioritize incidents based on predefined criteria. Automated workflows distribute tickets to appropriate resolution teams, reducing resolution times and enhancing service delivery.

AI-powered analytics analyze large incident data volumes to identify root causes of recurring issues. This proactive approach enables teams to address potential problems before they escalate into major incidents. Organizations implementing structured automation within ITSM report measurable improvements in operational efficiency and service quality.

10. Monitor metrics for continuous improvement

Effective KPI monitoring begins with ensuring all metrics align closely with strategic organizational goals. These indicators should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound to facilitate accurate tracking and assessment. Regular reviews and updates keep KPIs relevant as business needs and technologies evolve.

Automated monitoring and reporting solutions eliminate manual data collection, minimizing errors while ensuring current data availability. Visualization tools, including charts and graphs, help stakeholders interpret key performance indicator (KPI) data and identify trends easily. Automated alerts notify teams immediately of performance deviations, enabling prompt problem resolution.

11. Establish service catalog management

A comprehensive service catalog documents all IT services, including descriptions, costs, request procedures, and service level commitments. This transparency helps users understand available options while setting realistic expectations for delivery timelines. Categorizing services by type or department simplifies navigation and improves user experience.

Regular catalog reviews ensure accuracy as services evolve. Engage service owners to update offerings and add new capabilities.

12. Develop configuration management practices

Configuration management creates the foundational understanding of your IT environment necessary for effective service delivery. This practice maps relationships between infrastructure components, applications, and services.

A configuration management database (CMDB) serves as the authoritative source for configuration item information. Document hardware, software, network components, and their interdependencies to understand how changes in one area affect others. This visibility reduces change-related incidents and accelerates troubleshooting.

13. Implement capacity management

Proactive capacity management ensures your IT infrastructure can meet current and future demand without overprovisioning resources. This practice balances performance requirements with cost optimization. It prevents both service degradation and wasteful spending.

Monitor resource utilization across compute, storage, and network infrastructure to identify trends and predict future needs. Capacity planning models help forecast when additional resources become necessary, enabling proactive procurement and deployment. This forward-looking approach prevents performance issues that could impact user productivity.

14. Establish event management processes

Complementing proactive risk management, event management provides real-time monitoring and automated responses to system events. This practice detects potential issues before they become incidents, maintaining service stability through continuous oversight.

Configure monitoring tools to track critical system events, including performance thresholds, security alerts, and operational anomalies. Define appropriate responses for different event types, from automated remediation for routine issues to immediate escalation for critical alerts. This tiered approach ensures efficient resource utilization and rapid response capabilities.

Event correlation identifies patterns across multiple systems that indicate emerging problems. Analyzing related events together reveals root causes faster than investigating isolated incidents. This intelligence enables preventive actions that reduce overall incident volumes.

15. Build service continuity management

Service continuity management ensures critical IT services remain available during disruptions or disasters. Conduct business impact analyses to identify critical services and acceptable downtime thresholds. Develop recovery strategies for different disruption scenarios, from minor outages to major disasters. Document detailed recovery procedures, including roles and communication protocols.

Regular testing validates continuity plans and identifies gaps before actual disruptions occur. Conduct tabletop exercises and full recovery drills to ensure teams can execute plans effectively under pressure. Update plans based on test results and changing business requirements to maintain readiness.

Where can you implement ITIL best practices?

ITIL's wide-ranging and versatile framework makes it useful across the IT landscape. Here, it's important to establish these guidelines. Also ensure that you communicate them to all relevant stakeholders to verify that everybody is on the same page.

Incident management

Incident management in ITIL begins with setting up a standardized procedure for incident reporting. A centralized service desk captures all disruptions. This ensures that no incident is overlooked and that all relevant information is collected from the start.

Only 45% of businesses currently have an incident response plan in place. This suggests that ITIL practices can provide your organization with a significant leg up on the competition.

ITIL also encourages creating clear escalation paths for incidents that can't be resolved by first-line support. This necessitates defining criteria for when disruptions should be escalated to higher levels of support. Here, developing a knowledge base of known solutions can help resolve common issues more quickly. It enables first-line support to handle a greater number of incidents effectively.

Problem management

In problem management, it's essential that IT teams conduct thorough root cause analysis (RCA) for every major incident. Techniques such as the '5 Whys' or Fishbone diagrams can help in uncovering the underlying causes of problems. Once you identify a root cause, document the findings in your knowledge base. This will help address similar issues in the future.

Engaging in a proactive approach to problem management is another important practice. This involves analyzing historical incident data to identify trends and potential problem areas before they escalate. Regularly reviewing incident reports and KPIs can also help in addressing underlying issues preemptively.

Change management

It's vital that businesses establish a clear change management process. It should include procedures for requesting, assessing, approving, and implementing adjustments.

Checking that all changes are submitted using a standard request form is important.

This form helps evaluate the risks and benefits before approval. This process helps maintain control and reduce possible disruptions.

Also, sharing details about upcoming changes with stakeholders, like users, IT staff, and business units, helps everyone get ready. This requires providing information about the change schedule, potential impacts, and any necessary actions from stakeholders. After making a change, post-implementation reviews help determine whether it worked as planned and identify any problems.

Service Level Agreement management

Here, business leaders must first define clear and measurable service level agreement (SLA) targets that align with user expectations. This requires collaborating with stakeholders to understand their needs and setting specific criteria for service performance. Agreements should be clear and include measurable metrics. This helps ensure that both service providers and users understand the expectations.

Continuously reviewing and updating agreements based on changing business needs is also critical for effective SLA management. Regularly engaging with stakeholders to revise SLA terms ensures that agreements remain reflective of current requirements and expectations. This might involve adjusting performance targets, incorporating new service metrics, or revising terms based on feedback.

Knowledge management

ITIL emphasizes creating knowledge management (KM) practices that aim to capture, structure, and share information within an organization. The main goal is to make sure that accurate information is available to the right people when they need it. This reduces response times and improves problem resolution rates. By categorizing information and applying metadata, ITIL practices allow organizations to establish a centralized knowledge repository.

A key aspect of implementing ITIL-aligned knowledge management is the continual improvement of knowledge assets. ITIL encourages organizations to regularly update, review, and validate information to ensure it remains relevant and aligned with the latest business objectives. Moreover, it promotes cross-departmental collaboration in KM, enabling IT, support, and business teams to contribute and share insights.

IT asset management

By categorizing assets and defining ownership, ITIL helps establish clear accountability and transparency over IT resources. This practice improves compliance with regulatory requirements. It also helps organizations avoid unnecessary costs by reducing underutilized resources and minimizing risks related to asset mismanagement.

One of the key ITIL practices for asset management is configuration management. This involves keeping a CMDB. It serves as a central place for information about each asset and its connections to other resources. This repository helps organizations watch asset performance, track changes, and see how incidents affect the IT environment.

Benefits of following ITIL best practices

By sticking to ITIL's guidelines, businesses can standardize their technical processes. This ensures consistent service quality, faster response times, and improved resource utilization. These practices create a framework that helps teams manage complex IT environments more effectively.

Let's dive into some of the key advantages that ITIL can offer:

Enhance user satisfaction and experience

ITIL emphasizes structured frameworks for managing IT services, which helps businesses align technical operations with user needs. For example, incident management and problem management aim to reduce downtime. They quickly address service disruptions to ensure timely service. This responsiveness builds trust and reliability.

ITIL also encourages ongoing evaluation and refinement of IT services, ensuring that they adapt to evolving service needs. For example, by analyzing data from user interactions and technical incidents, organizations can identify trends and pain points.

Simplify operations

Following ITIL best practises can streamline IT operations by providing standardized frameworks for managing technical services. It reduces complexity and operational inefficiencies. This structured approach reduces duplicate work and prevents chaotic troubleshooting. It helps IT teams manage issues more easily.

Moreover, ITIL simplifies technical processes through its emphasis on knowledge management. KM helps create a centralized repository of information. It lets teams quickly access proven solutions, past incident reports, and troubleshooting guides.

This reduces time spent on reinventing solutions for recurring issues. It also empowers IT staff with the resources they need to respond more efficiently.

Optimize business alignment

Through practices like service strategy and service design, ITIL guides organizations to consider broader business objectives when developing and delivering IT services. For example, ITIL's service level management establishes clear SLAs that define expectations and performance standards based on business priorities.

Moreover, ITIL's emphasis on business relationship management (BRM) enables technical teams to stay attuned to evolving organizational needs and adapt services accordingly. BRM encourages ongoing communication between IT and business units. This ensures that technical teams can anticipate and respond to changes in business strategy or service demand.

Effectively manage risk

Businesses can manage risks more effectively with ITIL by embedding risk assessment and mitigation into their service management processes. Change management, for instance, looks at the careful assessment of risks linked to changes in the technical environment. By requiring risk assessments and approvals for modifications, ITIL helps prevent unintended service disruptions or security vulnerabilities that could arise from poorly managed changes.

ITIL further enhances risk management by emphasizing business continuity and service-level management. By setting clear SLAs and continuity plans, ITIL prioritizes important services. It also makes sure recovery plans are ready.

Cost savings

ITIL can also help drive cost savings through efficient resource utilization and proactive planning across IT services. For instance, its capacity management guidelines enable organizations to forecast IT demand accurately, ensuring resources are neither over- nor under-provisioned. This prevents unnecessary spending on infrastructure that may sit idle, while also avoiding the costly consequences of insufficient capacity.

Even more, financial management practices help control IT costs. They do this by setting up budgeting, accounting, and cost-tracking systems for technical services.

Financial management gives a clear view of technical spending. This helps businesses assess the value of each IT service. It also makes it easier to reduce or cut back on low-priority investments.

Enhance team collaboration

Adhering to ITIL 4 best practices enhances team collaboration. It promotes clear roles, structured workflows, and shared objectives within IT service management. When all staff align on these standards, cross-functional teams can work more effectively toward shared outcomes. This reduces silos and builds a unified approach to delivering consistent, high-quality services.

ITIL's service transition guidelines also create well-defined processes for moving services from development into operation, thereby enhancing communication between departments. Service transition provides structured steps and handoffs, ensuring that everyone involved in deploying a service has the necessary resources. This minimizes miscommunication and ensures smooth transitions, as teams know when and how to coordinate their actions.

Integrating ITIL with other frameworks

Many frameworks fall under the ITSM umbrella and offer unique benefits for the businesses that employ them.

Organizations often use several of these methods at the same time. This helps meet a wide range of technical needs that one framework alone may not handle well. Thus, companies should have processes in place to leverage these approaches and verify that all are contributing to common goals.

Six Sigma

Six Sigma is a data-driven methodology aimed at improving processes by identifying and eliminating defects to achieve near-perfect quality. It employs a structured problem-solving approach known as DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) to drive improvements. It ensures that solutions are based on empirical data and rigorous analysis.

Integrating ITIL with Six Sigma involves aligning the best practices of ITIL's service management framework with Six Sigma's focus on quality management. By identifying common goals, such as improving service quality and operational efficiency, organizations can create a cohesive strategy that leverages both ITIL's structured service management processes and Six Sigma's data-driven approach to process improvement.

Lean

Lean methodology focuses on optimizing processes by eliminating waste and enhancing value delivery. In ITSM, this translates to streamlining technical processes, reducing redundancies, and improving service delivery efficiency. A Lean approach employs techniques like value stream mapping, which helps visualize the flow of information, identifying bottlenecks and areas where waste can be reduced.

When integrated with ITIL practices, one effective approach is to align Lean principles to expedite service management activities. For example, value stream mapping can be used to analyze ITIL processes such as incident management and change management. By mapping out these processes, companies can eliminate non-value-added steps, reduce cycle times, and improve overall efficiency.

Agile

An Agile approach in ITSM is characterized by its emphasis on flexibility, iterative development, and continuous improvement to adapt to changing requirements. This dynamic stance ensures that organizations continuously refine and align technical services with user needs for improved service delivery.

Connecting an Agile methodology with ITIL requires focusing on how ITIL's framework can support Agile's iterative cycles and adaptive changes. This integration ensures that while Agile teams work in short, repetitive cycles, the overall service management framework remains robust and focused on continuous improvement.

Measuring the ROI of ITIL best practices

Understanding the financial impact of ITIL implementation helps justify investments and demonstrates value to organizational leadership.

• Reduced downtime and improved availability: Track mean time to resolution and system availability metrics to calculate the financial impact by multiplying the number of avoided downtime hours by the cost per hour of system unavailability.

• Lower operational costs: Monitor reductions in emergency change costs, overtime expenses, and third-party support fees. Also track efficiency improvements like tickets resolved per agent to demonstrate cost savings that offset implementation investments.

• Faster service delivery: Measure cycle times for service requests and change implementations to calculate productivity gains by multiplying time saved by average employee costs, showing how reduced waiting time improves business productivity.

• Key metrics for ROI calculation: Establish baseline measurements for incident resolution time, change success rate, service availability, cost per ticket, and employee productivity. Then track quarterly to demonstrate improvement trends while documenting both hard savings and soft benefits for organizational value assessment.

Implement best practices and optimize your ITIL processes today with Freshservice!

Freshservice acts as an all-in-one ITSM solution. It provides businesses with the scale and flexibility required to adapt to whichever service management framework they choose.

Its broad nature lets it work as one platform for all technical tasks. This includes incident management, problem management, change management, and more. Proactive tools like service health monitoring and alert management also help teams get a head start on any issues. This positions them to quickly address problems before they snowball.

Looking to enhance your IT asset management (ITAM) approach? Freshservice has you covered! A strong set of ITAM features helps teams manage assets better.

These features include asset lifecycle management, automated discovery, and an integrated CMDB. They ensure that teams know how to use technical resources and how they rely on each other at all times.