ITIL 4 Foundation — Fundamentals
The seven guiding principles
ITIL 4's guiding principles are recommendations meant to inform decision-making regardless of specific circumstance, team structure, or leadership style: focus on value (everything an organization does should connect, directly or indirectly, to value for stakeholders), start where you are (assess and use existing services, processes, and capabilities rather than discarding them unnecessarily when starting an improvement effort), progress iteratively with feedback (avoid attempting large, all-at-once initiatives — break work into manageable pieces with feedback loops), collaborate and promote visibility (working together across boundaries, with transparent, accessible information, produces better outcomes and buy-in than siloed work), think and work holistically (no service, practice, or process operates in isolation — recognize how organizational elements interconnect), keep it simple and practical (use the minimum number of steps to accomplish an objective, removing anything that doesn't contribute to the desired outcome), and optimize and automate (maximize the value of human effort by using technology to do what technology does well, freeing people for work requiring human judgment). (needs verification — recheck against current source: exact principle wording is set by Axelos and periodically clarified.)
Why guiding principles apply universally rather than situationally
An important conceptual point: unlike specific practices (Advanced), which apply differently across different organizational contexts, the seven guiding principles are explicitly designed to apply in any circumstance — this is the ITIL 4 exam's frequently tested distinction between principles (universal, situation-independent guidance) and practices (specific, context-dependent implementations). A question describing almost any IT service management scenario can reasonably be analyzed through "which guiding principle is most relevant here," since the principles are deliberately built for that kind of broad applicability.
The Service Value Chain — six core activities
The service value chain is the SVS's operating model, describing six activities an organization combines flexibly (not necessarily sequentially) to convert demand into value: plan (ensuring shared understanding of vision, status, and improvement direction), improve (ensuring continual improvement of products, services, and practices), engage (understanding stakeholder needs and maintaining relationships), design and transition (ensuring products and services meet stakeholder expectations for quality, cost, and time-to-market), obtain/build (ensuring service components are available when and where needed, meeting specifications), and deliver and support (ensuring services are delivered and supported according to agreed specifications and stakeholder expectations). These six activities aren't a fixed sequence — different value streams (specific combinations of activities and practices for a specific scenario) combine them in different orders depending on the actual work being done.
Practices — the specific "how" beneath the value chain
Where guiding principles provide universal decision-making guidance and the service value chain describes the operating model, practices (34 total, Overview) are the specific sets of organizational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective — incident management, change enablement, and service desk are commonly tested examples. Practices are what actually get performed within value chain activities, connecting the SVS's more abstract structure to concrete, familiar IT service management activities.