ITIL - The home of bad diagrams

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) codifies the management of IT infrastructure, development and operations. It is also a rich source of bad diagrams. I recently came across this ITIL diagram:

Too many boxes and lines that overwhelm the reader. It is a classic example of violating the conclusion of Miller's paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.

A better approach is to use multiple diagrams. Let's begin with a high level diagram:

This high level diagram gives us context from which we can then dive into more detail. We also now have a title and legend to help the reader understand the diagram. The legend reveals problems, for example the lines nearly always represent deliverables however 'Early life support' is an activity not a deliverable. The original diagram allowed the same notation to represent different concepts.

The clearer diagram also makes it easier to see some weird things in ITIL. For example you would expect the 'Service design package' to feed into Service Design, but no it feeds into Service Transition!

Now lets dive into more detail about Service Strategy:

The box for Service Strategy is repeated as the title to help the reader navigate. The sub-stages are a different colour to highlight they are different from stages. The original diagram used lines with arrows to represent both deliverables and activities. The redrawn diagram fixes this, for example 'Develop Offerings' was changed to 'Offerings'.

The original diagram had additional concepts such as 'Return on Investment' and 'Financial Management'. These could be described in the supporting text. Do not overload diagrams or your message will be lost.

Meaningless diagrams

The diagram above was taken from the Internet by a manager in the workplace and placed on the company's training portal. The manager said it explained Change Management (ITIL). It actually explains nothing.

The intersection of the circles are unlabelled - we do not know what they mean. The lines for people, process and technology are silly. Are they really trying to say that people are only involved in applications? Surely infrastructure and data require the involvement of people - technology and a bit of process cannot by themselves support infrastructure and data. The icon used to represent process is baffling.

The challenge is what would be a better diagram. Unfortunately the diagram is so poor we don't know what it was trying to communicate so we can't fix it.