ITIL Workflow Diagrams come under the same sort of discussion as process diagrams within newsgroups and chat rooms. That is “does ITIL make these prescriptive enough?”

An Answer!

The short answer is yes. Lets look at one process – Incident Management, Now when you look through the ITIL books one thing should become obvious. That is that there is more of a tendency to be a little more prescriptive with ITIL Workflow Diagrams for the Operational facing processes rather than the Tactical facing ones.

Example

When you look through the Service support book you will find Annex 5d which covers the workflow for Incident investigation. This is quite prescriptive. Overall you can see that certain processes have more specific ITIL Workflow Diagrams because of the process orientation but others are far more focused on higher level goals rather than simple workflow.

Prescriptive or Not?

It is also very interesting to note that the Service Delivery processes typically look at a more Iterative cycle such as within Service Level Management – It has a continuous improvement cycle built in such as in the following list of major activities; Initiation of the Process, Definition of the Services to be provided to the customer, Agreement on the quality level of the service, Monitoring of the service achievements, Reporting these to the customer and Review of everything included within the process including the process itself.

These are typically far less prescriptive. What must be remembered is the need to design workflow around the Business requirement, not solely on what the book says!