These 34 individual practices are divided up into three categories. General management practices, service management practices, and technical management practices. This begs the question though, what exactly is a practice? Try to dig up about an article or two about the service value system and you'll find that there is a portion of the diagram that called out these practices.

A practice is a set of organized resources designed for performing work or accomplishing an objective. Each practice is going to support multiple service value chain activities, and each includes resources based on the four dimensions of IT service management. The first 14 practices of ITIL 4 are known as the general management practices. But before diving in to those general management practices, you need to be able to recall the purpose of 15 of the ITIL practices, remembering their definitions, since these are at the recall level of knowledge for the ITIL 4 exam. As a reminder, there are 34 practices inside of ITIL 4, and each will be covered briefly in separate articles here at itil.diontraning.com. And of these 15, there are six of them that you have to know more in depth. There are also seven terms that are under the recall level of knowledge for the exam. These are the IT asset, event, configuration item, change, incident, problem, and known error.