Developing Documentation in Alignment with ITIL Principles

Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, is a set of best practices for aligning IT activities with organizational goals. Within the latest version, ITIL 4, seven guiding principles form a framework for value-driven service management.

In this blog, we’ll examine each of these principles and help you identify strategies to align your ITSM documentation process with the ITIL framework.

Focus on Value

ITIL recommends you “focus on value,” meaning everything you do, from internal processes to customer-facing activities, should be done with the purpose of contributing value to back to your organization, to the customer, or to other stakeholders.

Process documentation helps you achieve this goal by ensuring each customer receives the same high quality of service as well as eliminating the burden on your team to handle complex issues without the proper support.

Start Where You Are

The principle of “starting where you are” encourages teams to look at what they already have and understand how they got there before starting to build something from the ground up. Then, based on that understanding, you can either choose to restart or improve on what already exists.

Here’s how that plays in as you begin to develop internal documentation or customer-facing documentation: does your organization store important information in multiple different places?

Instead of starting from scratch, see if you can consolidate information gathered from these various sources or repurpose it in a new way.

Progress Iteratively with Feedback

Transformation doesn’t happen overnight. ITIL’s recommendation is to progress iteratively, making change happen in smaller increments, and utilize feedback to ensure those changes have the intended impact.

To give your team a structure for iterative progression, schedule periodic reviews of your help desk content to discover areas where you can improve. Use Confluence analytics to help you determine what’s helpful to your customers and which areas need improvement.

Collaborate and Promote Visibility

ITIL recognizes that long-term success comes when people work together across teams. This leads to more widespread buy-in across the organization and a better understanding of shared processes and goals.

Consolidated information both enhances collaboration and promotes visibility. When you build your documentation in one location, like Confluence, that integrates where your team works, you can make it visible to more people in more places.

Think and Work Holistically

Service has multiple dimensions, from the customers interacting with the service desk to the technologies and processes used to manage those interactions.

You can’t have one without the others, so ITIL encourages teams to think of service management holistically, meaning an improvement to one dimension should be an improvement to all.

To help you think and work holistically, we’d recommend hosting a cross-functional kickoff when you plan to make significant changes to your service management tools or processes, so you know you’re considering all aspects of the issue.

Confluence offers page templates for project kickoffs that you can use or modify as needed to document your team's insights.

Keep It Simple and Practical

You don’t need to develop a thirty-step process for every scenario to align with ITIL principles. In fact, it’s better to keep things as simple as possible to encourage adoption.

This includes your process for documentation itself. Thankfully, there are a few shortcuts you can take to build documentation quickly without sacrificing quality, such as Confluence’s page templates and Gliffy’s Mermaid diagram generator.

These simple, practical steps make documentation a more manageable and practical part of your workflow.

Optimize and Automate

From an ITSM perspective, there are plenty of processes to automate and just as many areas where you can unlock a higher level of efficiency. In fact, we have an entire webinar on unleashing workflow efficiency with the help of Atlassian solutions.

One way documentation can help you automate ITSM processes is through Confluence's integration with Jira Service Management.

When you integrate documentation with help center forms, helpful content can be served to customers before they even submit—hopefully increasing ticket deflection.

Documentation for ITSM: Additional Resources

ITSM teams have a lot on their plate, from handling customer questions to optimizing internal processes, and all of it involves documentation.

Wherever you are on your ITSM documentation journey, we have plenty of resources to help you make the most of your knowledge base.

Explore More Resources