This guide will take you through the vital aspects of the Continual Service Improvement stage of the ITIL Lifecycle, with tips to help you implement it in your daily practice.

ITIL is the well-known set of practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. Figure 1 provides a high level overview of the complete ITIL service lifecycle. This Quick Reference Guide (QRG) is the 5th and last in our series of Quick Reference Guides for ITIL and covers the Continual Service Improvement lifecycle phase of ITIL.

So far, we have learned some of the key concepts of ITIL Service Management, Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Transition and Service Operation. Continual Service Improvement (CSI) focuses on increasing the efficiency, maximizing the effectiveness and optimizing the cost of IT services and the underlying processes. These objectives are achieved by identifying improvement opportunities throughout the service lifecycle.

This Quick Reference Guide provides a summary of the Continual Service Improvement lifecycle for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, more commonly ITIL. The information contained is derived from the Axelos ITIL Foundation Handbook and supplemented from the ITIL Service Strategy Lifecycle publication. The document is based on ITIL 2011.