This document outlines 6 steps to avoid poor IT service management practices and instead implement ITIL best practices to improve efficiency and reduce costs. It provides an example scenario of how an organization can: 1) Assess their current IT service management processes and identify objectives to reduce downtime, increase efficiency, and improve service levels. 2) Implement recommendations from ITIL processes like incident management, problem management, and change management to reduce detection/diagnosis time and save over £300,000 annually. 3) Measure the success of improvements by calculating reduced staffing costs of £50,000 annually and increased availability savings of £750,000 annually, for a total net annual savings of £690,000.