7 ITIL guiding principles to project your life

Recently I did a training called ITIL4-Foundation. After the training, I realized that some of the content, mainly the 7 ITIL guiding principles, can also be used to better manage my life. Do you want to know how you can apply the 7 ITIL guiding principles to your life?

What is ITIL?

First, let's start with explaining what is ITIL. ITIL stands for?Information Technology Infrastructure Library. It is a well-known framework used in the IT sector with the purpose to improve efficiency in the fulfillment of the overall service delivery needs. If you are a Project Manager or any other professional, moving to the IT sector, ITIL4-Foundation is the right training for you.

The 7 guiding principles

One of the component from ITIL is the guiding principles. A principle is a fundamental truth that serves as the foundation for a system of belief that will not change over the time.

Independent of the degree of change or transformation that the IT organizations or departments would assist, the guiding principles would continue unchanged. In such transformational changes, the IT guiding principles will help to navigate by supporting on taking the right decision.

The guiding principles that help the IT organizations to take the right decisions in any scenario can also be applied to our lifes maangement. They can also be used as recommendations or suggestions to take the right decisions in the direction of a succesfull life.

There are 7 ITIL guiding principles: Focus on value, Start where you are, Collaborate and promote visibility, Keep it simple and practical, Progress iteratively with feedback, Think and work holistically, Progress iteratively with feedback, Optimize and automate.

In each paragraph below, we will go one by one, by keeping unchanged the guiding principle title from ITIL but with a slightly different description to consider the adaptation into life management.

Focus on value

• Map every daily action to the value that it creates for the personal goals that you've set.
• Pursue only the goals that can add value to your life and that, ultimately, can improve your happiness.

Start where you are

• Always consider your current strengths and opportunities from the path that you've already walked and that are already available to be leveraged.

Collaborate and promote visibility

• Find possible collaboration with people that can support and motivate you in order to have greater accountability and better likelihood of achieving your goals.
• Your goals should be visible to you but should also be shared with others. You would only find collaboration if others knows what you're trying to achieve.

Keep it simple and practical

• Plan the daily activities necessary to produce the desired outcome.
• Eliminate what doesn't provides any value or produces no useful outcome.
• Use the minimum number of steps necessary to accomplish your objectives. Don't try to make it perfect, instead takes time as a constrain!

Think and work holistically

• The achieved outputs stands alone, in case you don't combine them in outcomes.
• The quality of your outcomes will suffer unless you implement them immediately on your daily life.

Progress iteratively with feedback

• Do not attempt to do everything at once.
• Break down your goal into objectives, work packages and activities.
• Use feedback before, throughout and after to ensure that the achieved outputs provides you the required outcomes.

Optimize and automate

• Resources, including human resources and technology, should be used to their best effect.
• Transform your new learnings into skills to become less dependent.

At the same time we, as professionals in the IT sector, should use recurrently the ITIL guiding principles to support on decision-making in our projects, we can now do the same regarding decisions outside the professional dimension of life, mainly for personal goal achievement.

Have you already done a ITIL training? Are you using the 7 guiding principles recurently in your projects? What do you think about using them for goals achievement? Please let me know your answers and comments about this article.

I wish You a Fa-Bu-Lux Life?:)

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