Seven principles, and they apply to ITIL itself
The seven guiding principles are focus on value, start where you are, progress iteratively with feedback, collaborate and promote visibility, think and work holistically, keep it simple and practical, and optimise and automate. They are recommendations that hold in every situation, including the adoption of ITIL itself.
Why it is like this
The principles are meant to be applied together. The three everyone quotes are the easy ones; the corrective value sits in the four that get left out, which is why the list is worth knowing in full rather than by sample.
Not to be confused with
A maturity model, or a checklist to be scored against. Nothing here is auditable — a principle that holds in every situation cannot also be a control, and treating the seven as a compliance list is the most common way to drain them of use.
In practice
ITIL applies them to itself: *start where you are* says to assess the practices an organisation already runs before installing anything named after the framework.
Source: ITIL 4 Foundation (AXELOS / PeopleCert), 2019 edition — §4.3. Read on .
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Odd one out Check yourself
Three of these are the seven guiding principles. Which one is not?
Show the answer
Measure everything that moves
The seven are: focus on value; start where you are; progress iteratively with feedback; collaborate and promote visibility; think and work holistically; keep it simple and practical; optimise and automate.