Getting Started
Key management figures are introduced to ITIL principles and committed to ITIL implementation. That will help ensure proper management attention, and secure necessary funding, training and other resources required for successful implementation.

Service Definition
ITIL has a strong focus on services, so the best way to start is by creating a service overview, composed of business services and IT services that support them. At this point, we record any agreements, or commitments, that reflect business services (e.g. a website is used by retailers, and must be available 24/7), which will later be used for supporting technical architecture design and SLA design.

ITIL Roles & Owners
It is important to know who is responsible for what, and therefore introduce designated roles and functions according to ITIL framework. Depending on the scope of ITIL implementation, not all ITIL roles may be required in your case, but identifying key roles and owners is a must.

Gap analysis
The next step is to analyze the current state of the processes and the level of process maturity. This action needs to be performed by a person with ITIL experience so as to keep the focus on the process itself, rather than on historical reasons that led to the current process state. Conclusions of the gap analysis will describe how much effort is required in terms of time, money, and human resources to achieve the vision.

Planning of new processes
For the implementation of new processes, we consider ITIL best practices as a whole; this means that if you are implementing Incident Management, you should consider implementing Problem Management as well, due to the close relationship between the two.

Process control
When designing a process for our clients, we implement measurable metrics (KPI) that will clearly display whether the process is running according to expectations or not.

Implementation Roadmap
The aim of an implementation roadmap is to provide an overview of all the steps required to successfully complete the project. A good approach to ITIL implementation would be to divide the available timeframe into chunks, where you address steps according to priorities.

Implementation of ITIL processes
At this point we check whether the implementation plan has fully met expectations, if all services were successfully implemented, and if the processes are producing the outputs you wanted.

If not, you can use the Continual Service Improvement (CSI) process to identify and correct any service or process that isn’t performing up to expectations. CSI is a vital part of ITIL methodology, as it continuously searches for new areas of improvement, and drives the change within the Service Lifecycle. Those changes should always end up with measurable improvements.