ITIL Foundation v5 study guide

Forty questions in sixty minutes, closed book. You need 26 correct out of 40, which is 65%. There is no negative marking, so never leave a question blank, and if the exam is not in your native or working language you may be granted 25% extra time, 75 minutes in total.

The exam sits at Bloom's levels 1 and 2. Level 1 is recall: can you state what a term means. Level 2 is comprehension: do you understand how the idea works. Nothing here asks you to apply the framework to a complex scenario, which is what the higher qualifications assess. That makes this a learnable exam, and it makes precision with vocabulary the thing that passes it.

The list style is where partial knowledge is punished hardest: you have to judge all four statements, not recognise one good answer. The negative style is where careful readers beat fast readers. Practise both deliberately.

Two categories carry 70% of the paper between them: the ITIL Value System at 40% and key terms and definitions at 30%. If your revision time is short, it belongs there. The remaining five categories share 30%, and two of them are worth a single question each.

That does not mean ignore the small ones. A mark is a mark, and the AI and frameworks categories are new, short, and easy to learn precisely because there is so little of them.

The Value System alone is 16 of the 40 marks. Add key terms and you are at 28 of 40, which is comfortably past the 26 needed to pass. That is not a suggestion to skip the rest, but it does tell you where the first pass of revision goes.

Four qualities that together determine whether something is fit to use and fit for purpose. The exam tests the distinction constantly.

A service needs both utility and warranty to be useful. Something that does the right job but is unavailable half the time has utility without warranty; something reliable that does the wrong job has warranty without utility.

Three kinds of service relationship, in increasing order of closeness: basic, where the provider delivers and the consumer receives with little interaction; cooperative, where the two work together on defined goals; and collaborative, where they work as partners with shared objectives. The service journey is the full path a consumer takes through their relationship with the provider.

Service quality is how well a service meets expectations; a service level is a measured and reported target; and a service level agreement (SLA) is a documented agreement between provider and consumer identifying required services and expected levels.

A service offering is a description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target consumer group. It may include goods (transferred to the consumer), access to resources (granted for agreed use but not transferred), and service actions (performed by the provider to address consumer needs).

Service interactions are the exchanges between provider and consumer through which the service is delivered. The exam may ask you to sort an example, such as a supplied laptop, a licence, or a password reset, into goods, access, or actions.

All four dimensions sit inside an environment the organisation does not control. Version 5 assesses these external factors explicitly at Foundation level, which ITIL 4 did not.

Learn the acronym and one example of each. That is very likely enough for the marks available, and questions here tend to ask you to classify a described factor.

A memory aid for the order, which is worth knowing even though the activities are not performed in it: Discover, Design, Acquire, Build, Transition, Operate, Deliver, Support. Two Ds at the front, two in the middle of the back half.

The ITIL Value System describes how the parts of an organisation work together to enable value creation. Learn these five, and which of them each other idea belongs to.

Unchanged from ITIL 4, which is good news if you have studied before. They are universal: they apply to every situation, at every level, regardless of the organisation.

The principles interact and reinforce one another, and the exam may ask about that directly. You cannot focus on value without collaborating to learn what stakeholders value; you cannot optimise sensibly without starting where you are.

Governance is the means by which an organisation is directed and controlled. Its role in the Value System is enabling: it sets direction, establishes policies, and provides oversight so that the rest of the system can operate with clarity. Its activities are commonly described as evaluate, direct and monitor. Governance is not the same as management: governance sets the direction and constraints, management works within them.

The value chain is the set of activities an organisation performs to deliver a valuable product or service. A large share of this category's marks sit in the defined terms that hang off those activities, so learn them precisely.

A management practice is a set of organisational resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective. Version 5 groups them into general management practices and product and service management practices.

This is where Version 5 differs most sharply from ITIL 4. You are expected to know what a practice is, that the groups exist, the role practices play within the Value System, and what the ITIL Practice Guides are for and why they help. You are not asked to recite the steps of incident management, change enablement or the service desk. Those detailed workflows are no longer assessed at Foundation.

Two related terms: a metric is something measured and reported to help manage a service or activity, and a critical success factor (CSF) is a condition that must be met for something to succeed.

A seven-step model, phrased as questions. Learn them in order; the order is the point.

Notice how closely this tracks the guiding principles: step 2 is start where you are, step 4 is progress iteratively with feedback, and step 7 exists because improvements that are not embedded quietly reverse.

The purpose is to understand how work actually flows, rather than how anyone assumes it flows, and to find where value is delayed or lost. A map typically shows the steps, who performs them, the time spent working versus waiting, and the handoffs between teams. Waiting time between steps is usually where the surprise is: work often spends far longer queued than being worked on.

Because organisations are complex rather than merely complicated, workflows need to be optimised for complexity. That means designing for feedback and adaptation rather than assuming a fixed sequence will hold.

AI governance is the direction and control of how AI is used: the policies, accountability and oversight that keep its use appropriate, ethical and compliant. It exists because AI introduces risks, including bias, opacity and the automation of decisions nobody has checked.

The ITIL AI Capability Model describes the capabilities an organisation needs to adopt and use AI effectively. For a single mark, knowing what it is for and that it exists as a named model is the sensible depth.

DevOps focuses on collaboration between development and operations, and on fast, automated, reliable flow of change into live use. ITIL provides the wider management system: governance, value, service relationships and continual improvement.

They fit together because they answer different questions. DevOps largely answers how work flows and how quickly; ITIL answers whether it is the right work, who it serves, and how it is directed and improved. Practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery sit comfortably inside the ITIL lifecycle rather than outside it.

Both are PeopleCert frameworks, and Version 5 asks you to understand why project management matters within ITIL at all.

Much of what happens in the product and service lifecycle is project work: discovering, designing, acquiring, building and transitioning a new service is a temporary endeavour with a defined end. PRINCE2 provides the structure for running that work, including a business case, defined roles, stages and tolerances. ITIL provides the surrounding context: why the service exists, who it serves, and how it will be operated and improved once the project has closed.

The complementarity, in one line: PRINCE2 governs the change, ITIL governs the service the change produces, before, during and long after the project ends.