Right Practice vs. Best Practice in ITSM

The Problem With 'Best Practice'

The phrase 'best practice' carries an implicit claim that deserves scrutiny. Best for whom? In what context? Under what constraints? What worked exceptionally well for a global bank with a mature ITSM function, a dedicated team and a long-established tooling estate is not necessarily transferable to a mid-sized professional services firm implementing its first structured ITSM capability.

ITIL, ISO 20000, COBIT — these are excellent frameworks. But they are descriptions of what mature service management looks like across a wide range of organisations. They are not prescriptions for what your organisation should do next Tuesday.

The Right Practice Mindset

The shift from best practice to right practice is fundamentally about context. It asks a different question: not "what does the framework say?" but "what will actually work here, given who we are, where we are and what we are trying to achieve?"

In practice, this means accepting that some ITIL practices need to be implemented in simplified or modified forms in order to gain adoption. A perfectly designed incident management process that nobody follows is less valuable than a pragmatic one that everyone understands and uses consistently.

What This Looks Like in Practice

When we conduct assessments, we consistently find that the organisations with the strongest ITSM maturity are not those that have implemented ITIL most completely — they are those that have implemented it most thoughtfully. They have been selective about which practices to prioritise, pragmatic about what 'good enough' looks like at each stage, and disciplined about building on what works rather than starting from scratch.

They have also been honest about the gap between documentation and reality. A process document that reflects how things work in theory, rather than how they actually work, is not a foundation for improvement — it is a barrier to understanding where improvement is actually needed.

The Starting Point

Understanding what 'right practice' looks like for your organisation begins with an honest assessment of where you are. Not where your processes say you are, but where the evidence — from interviews with practitioners and leaders alike — suggests you actually are.

From that honest starting point, a pragmatic improvement roadmap can be built that prioritises the changes most likely to deliver real improvement in the shortest time — regardless of whether they represent 'best practice' in the abstract.