5.2. The ITIL Guiding Principles

💡 First Principle: The guiding principles are seven pieces of always-applicable advice for making good decisions — they're the framework's accumulated wisdom distilled into rules of thumb you can apply to any situation regardless of the specific work.

Why care: most day-to-day service decisions aren't covered by a specific procedure. The principles fill that gap — they're how you decide well when no rule tells you what to do. The mental model: seven lenses you hold up to any proposed action, asking "does this focus on value? does it start where we are? is it iterative?" and so on. They reinforce each other and are meant to be used together.

⚠️ Common Misconception: That you apply the principles one at a time, like a checklist. They interact and reinforce one another — you weigh all seven together for any decision, and they sometimes pull in tension that you must balance.