ITIL 4 Project Management – A Quick Overview

It’s easy to overlook the ITIL 4 Project Management Practice Guide within the 34 ITIL 4 management practices. However, it’s packed with practical, proven guidance that reflects the guidance of another globally adopted PeopleCert “property” – PRINCE2, the internationally respected project management framework. But why should IT service management (ITSM) professionals care about project management?

There are likely various answers to this question, but whether you’re driving ITSM improvements or contributing as a subject matter expert (SME) in business or IT projects, understanding project management fundamentals is essential for success.

Projects explained

Projects aren’t just another element of daily IT operations. ITIL 4 helps explain this by defining projects as distinct from ongoing business-as-usual (BAU) activities because they:

• Introduce significant change
• Are temporary in nature
• Involve risks and opportunities beyond BAU norms.

Projects are also “time-boxed” – they have a clear start and end. If your work doesn’t have a defined end date, it might not actually be a project. On the flip side, if it does have an end date and produces something new, it probably qualifies.

Projects may also be part of a broader program, contributing to a bigger organizational goal.

Project vs. program management

The ITIL 4 project management guidance doesn’t treat project management as a standalone discipline. Instead, it emphasizes that projects shouldn’t exist in isolation. They should always support broader organizational aims – often as part of a program.

This is why the ITIL 4 guide covers project and program management (PPM), not just project execution.

Project management isn’t just progress tracking

It’s easy for us ITSM professionals to assume that project management is mainly about tracking timelines and milestones. However, effective project management is broader and more strategic.

PeopleCert’s PRINCE2 project management guidance breaks it down into seven core elements:

1. Business case – Why are we doing this?
2. Organization – Who is involved?
3. Quality – What standards must we meet?
4. Plans – How, when, and how much?
5. Risk – What could go wrong (or right)?
6. Change – What happens if things shift?
7. Progress – How are we doing, and should we continue?

As with all ITIL practices, project management should be adopted and adapted based on your organization’s context and needs.

Agile project management

Agile project management might feel unfamiliar if your project management background has been in traditional “waterfall” project methods. However, it’s increasingly important. In Agile environments, teams are empowered to make decisions. The project manager acts more like a facilitator than a director.

Key Agile project management behaviors include:

• Encouraging continuous customer involvement
• Educating stakeholders on empowerment
• Trusting teams to work autonomously
• Including the team in release planning
• Fostering collaboration and transparency.

The Agile project manager focuses on enabling a healthy, communicative environment while still tracking progress and adjusting as needed.

The ITIL 4 project management practice success factors

The ITIL 4 project management practice has two practice success factors (PSFs):

1. “Establishing and maintaining an effective approach to program and project management across the organization
2. Ensuring the successful realization of programs and projects.”

Your organization can use a maturity model such as the Portfolio, Program, and Project Management Maturity Model (P3M3) for the first PSF. This assesses the suitability of your organization’s project management methods, tools, and techniques, plus the competence of project management professionals.

Post-implementation reviews can highlight failings in project operations and delivery to meet the second PSF. Here, the reviews, embedding lessons, and feedback are essential to your organization’s project management improvement and better benefit realization.

Five ITIL 4 project management practice rules to help prevent project failure

The following text, like that above, is lifted from the PeopleCert Project Management ITIL 4 Practice Guide:

1. “Begin with the end in mind: start with a clear project scope
2. Build a project plan: visualize everything that needs to be done on a timeline
3. Do not be so connected to the plan: things can change and so does the plan
4. Check, update, and monitor: check the timeline for progress, update the timeline with actual performance, monitor the use of your resources
5. Keep an eye on the quality: you cannot retrofit quality and poor quality delivers poor benefits.”

This article is intended merely as a quick introduction to the best practices included in the ITIL 4 project management guidance. If you want to read more, please check out the PeopleCert website and the PeopleCert Plus Community.