Six activities, no fixed order
The service value chain has six activities: plan, improve, engage, design and transition, obtain/build, and deliver and support. They are not a sequence — a value stream combines them in whatever order a given scenario needs, and may revisit them.
Why it is like this
A single fixed lifecycle could not describe both a two-hour password reset and a two-year platform migration. Making the activities composable lets one model cover both.
Not to be confused with
A replacement for the ITIL v3 lifecycle stages. Plan and improve apply to every stream, and engage appears repeatedly rather than only at the start.
In practice
An incident stream might run engage → deliver and support → engage, and never touch obtain/build at all.
Source: ITIL 4 Foundation (AXELOS / PeopleCert), 2019 edition — §4.5 — the service value chain. Read on .
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Odd one out Check yourself
Three of these are service value chain activities. Which one is not?
Show the answer
Operate
"Operate" belonged to the v3 lifecycle. In ITIL 4 the operational work sits inside deliver and support.