5.5. Management Practices
💡 First Principle: A management practice is a set of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective — broader than a process — and ITIL groups these practices and documents them in Practice Guides so organizations don't reinvent well-understood capabilities.
Why care: practices are how the organization's capabilities are organized — incident management, change enablement, service desk, and dozens more. Treating a practice as merely a process loses the point that a practice spans all four dimensions (people, technology, suppliers, workflows). The mental model: a practice is a complete capability (people + tools + information + ways of working) aimed at an objective; a process is just one ingredient inside it.
⚠️ Common Misconception: That a "practice" is the same as a "process" (a holdover from ITIL v3 vocabulary). A practice is a set of resources across all four dimensions; a process is one element within a practice.
