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A practical guide to ITIL 4 in an age of agile

Executive summary

To keep up with the speed of business, IT teams are transforming the way they work. Gone are the days of inflexible processes and heavy workflows. IT teams are shifting towards more collaborative, iterative, and customer-centric approaches, in order to break down silos, adapt quickly, and deliver seamless experiences. In short, ITSM is becoming more agile.

Enter ITIL 4, the latest update to the widely used ITSM framework and the beginning of a new paradigm shift for IT teams. ITIL 4 offers a more holistic and flexible frame of reference, while embracing modern ways of working like agile and DevOps.

In this guide, Atlassian and AXELOS have partnered to help jumpstart your agile journey. You'll learn eight practices typically used by high-velocity IT teams, and tips from the Atlassian Team Playbook to bring more agility and collaboration into ITSM:

  • Continual improvement with retrospectives

  • Agile project management to speed up project delivery

  • Knowledge management to empower team culture

  • Customer-centric service desk and request management

  • Adaptive incident management

  • Streamlined change control through automation and collaboration

  • Continuous delivery for deployment management

  • Integrated software development and operations teams

Key takeaways

    What's new in ITIL 4—and what it means for you

    How to build high-velocity service teams through performance, culture, and practices

    The top 8 practices typically used by the best performing IT teams

    Tips and resources to bring agility and collaboration into ITSM

Authors

  • Akshay Anand

    ITSM Product Ambassador and Evangelist, AXELOS

    Akshay Anand

    ITSM Product Ambassador and Evangelist, AXELOS

    Akshay Anand is a Product Ambassador at AXELOS®, working on the development of new guidance and research within the ITSM portfolio. With experience from around the world, he previously advised Fortune 100 clients on how to improve their ITSM capabilities, implemented toolsets using ITIL best practices, and headed up global ITSM activities at Macmillan Publishing. More recently, Akshay has focused on bringing together agile development teams and ITSM professionals to address challenges posed by emerging technologies and market shifts. He infrequently tweets as @bloreboy, about ITIL, DevOps, food, comics and heavy metal.

  • Paul Buffington

    Lead Principal Solution Consultant, Atlassian

    Paul Buffington

    Lead Principal Solution Consultant, Atlassian

    Paul Buffington is a transformational leader in Service Management, recognized for driving technology and operational excellence across global enterprises. With over 15 years of enterprise consulting experience—including the past decade at Atlassian—Paul partners with organizations to embrace modern Systems of Work that transform how service teams operate. He specializes in blending agile methodologies, DevOps frameworks, and ITIL4 practices to boost operational efficiency, enhance team agility, and accelerate service delivery.

  • Ian Buchanan

    Principal Solutions Engineer, Atlassian

    Ian Buchanan

    Principal Solutions Engineer, Atlassian

    Ian Buchanan is a Principal Solutions Engineer for DevOps at Atlassian where he focuses on the emerging DevOps community and the application of Jira, Bitbucket, and Bamboo for better continuous integration and continuous delivery. While Ian Buchanan has broad and deep experience with both Java and .NET, he is best known as a champion of lean and agile practices in large enterprises.

    During his career, he has successfully managed enterprise software development tools in all phases of their lifecycle, from cradle to grave. He has driven organization-wide process improvement with results of greater productivity, higher quality, and improved customer satisfaction. He has built multi-national agile teams that value self-direction and self-organization. When not speaking or coding, you are likely to find Ian indulging his passions in parsers, meta-programming, and domain-specific languages.

  • Teresa Fok

    Senior Product Marketing Manager, ITSM, Atlassian

    Teresa Fok

    Senior Product Marketing Manager, ITSM, Atlassian

    Teresa Fok is a Product Marketing Manager at Atlassian where she looks after go-to-market strategies for Jira Service Management and ITSM solutions. From better understanding customer needs to helping them solve business challenges with Atlassian products, she's passionate about helping IT teams work better to drive change in their organizations. 

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