General Management Practices vs Product & Service Management Practices (ITIL® 5)

What Are Product and Service Management Practices?

Product and Service Management Practices are focused directly on delivering and managing digital products and services across their lifecycle — how services are designed and transitioned into operation, how incidents are handled, how change is governed, and how knowledge is managed and shared across teams. This category includes practices like Incident Management, Change Enablement, and Service Level Management, among others.

What Are General Management Practices?

General Management Practices cover broader organizational capabilities that support service delivery, rather than being specific to any one product or service. This includes practices like Strategy Management, Risk Management, Relationship Management, Supplier Management, Workforce and Talent Management, and Continual Improvement. These practices exist to give the organization the governance and management capability it needs, underpinning the more delivery-focused practices in the other category.

The Structural Change from ITIL® 4

This two-category structure is itself a change from ITIL® 4, which organized its 34 practices into three groups. ITIL® 5 no longer has a separate Technical Management Practices category — practices that used to sit there, like Deployment Management, Infrastructure and Platform Management, and Software Development and Management, were folded into the Product and Service Management Practices category instead.

Real-World Example

An organization's Incident Management practice — restoring service quickly when something breaks — is a Product and Service Management Practice, since it's directly focused on managing a specific service in operation. The same organization's Supplier Management practice, which governs how it manages relationships with the vendors supplying tools and components across many different services, is a General Management Practice — a broader organizational capability that supports service delivery generally, rather than being tied to any one specific service.

Why This Matters

Understanding this two-category structure matters because:

• The exam tests recognition of which practices sit in which category, and why
• It clarifies the structural change from ITIL® 4's three-category system, including the folding-in of the old Technical Management Practices
• It reinforces that General Management Practices exist to support delivery-focused practices, not to compete with them

Common Exam Mistakes

The most common mistake is assuming ITIL® 5 still uses ITIL® 4's three-practice-category structure. ITIL® 5 uses two categories, having folded the old Technical Management Practices into Product and Service Management Practices.

A second mistake is assuming General Management Practices are less important because they aren't service-specific. They provide the organizational and governance capability that delivery-focused practices depend on to function well.

Memory Trick

Think:

Product and Service Management Practices — running the specific services.

General Management Practices — running the organization behind them.

If a practice is tied to a specific service's delivery, it's Product and Service Management. If it's a broader organizational capability, it's General Management.

Key Takeaways

• ITIL® 5 organizes its practices into two categories: Product and Service Management Practices (22) and General Management Practices (12).
• Product and Service Management Practices focus on delivering and managing products and services across their lifecycle.
• General Management Practices provide broader organizational and governance capabilities that support delivery.
• This replaces ITIL® 4's three-category structure, folding the old Technical Management Practices into Product and Service Management Practices.
• This structural distinction is a tested area of the ITIL® 5 Foundation syllabus.

One Practice Question