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ITIL and PMBOK

Thanks for the great question Beverly.

ITIL V3 and PMBOK Project Management are both best practices that fall under the larger umbrella of IT Service Management (or really just overall Service Management). ITIL focuses on the lifecycle of services, while PMBOK focuses on the lifecycle of projects. Services are all of the things we do to deliver value to our customers. In effect services are a type of product. Projects are temporary (short term) endeavors we undertake to accomplish specific outputs. So we can look at projects as one mechanism or vehicle for establishing and delivering services, products, solutions, etc.

The decision as to undertake a project will be made as a result of ITIL Service Strategy and Service Design. The project team may then use PMBOK best practices for accomplishing the goal, objective or output identified during Strategy and Design. Conceptually this places Project Management roughly equivalent to ITIL Service Transition activities (with some overlap to Service Design and Service Operation). Service Transition includes processes such as Change Management, Service Asset and Configuration Management, and Knowledge Management that span the service lifecycle (and so run parallel to Project Management activities), along with Release and Deployment Management (which dovetails closely with Project Management activities).

It is important to remember that the identification of the need or reason for a project is separate from the project work itself. When you keep this in mind, you can see that ITIL V3 and PMBOK are very complementary and fit well into the overall Service Management approach. So begin with ITIL Strategy and Design, then use PMBOK to accomplish the creation of services and their underpinning elements.

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