Tudor’s ITSM Process Assessment (TIPA) is a method for assessing IT Service Management processes, in a structured, objective and repeatable way.

TIPA’s purpose is to determine to what extent those IT Service Management processes are in place in an organization, and to measure their maturity level, by focusing on the achievement of the process purpose, and by taking the business context into account.

TIPA is the result of a R&D project, created in Luxembourg and funded by the Ministère de la Culture, de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche. It was developed under the initiative of the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor (www.tudor.lu) in close cooperation with business organization’s IT departments, IT service providers, ITSM consultants and the ITSMF Luxembourgish chapter.

TIPA is the meeting between two standards:
- ITIL®: the de facto standard in IT Service Management widely adopted around the world.
- ISO/IEC 15504 Information technology – Process Assessment: the international standard in process assessment mostly known in software process improvement, but applicable to any process in any field of activity.

The TIPA method implements the concepts of standard process assessment (defined in the ISO/IEC 15504 standard) to the specific domain of IT Service Management (covered by ITIL® v2, ITIL® v3 or ISO/IEC 20000) in order to determine what best practices should be implemented, and what the maturity level of each ITSM process is. It can be the starting point of an improvement project and it also allows benchmarking processes of several suppliers, for supplier selection purposes.

The TIPA framework explains, in detail, how to perform an IT Service Management Process Assessment. It describes the different roles involved and actions to carry out all along the assessment project; it also contains a set of electronic documents, checklists and templates supporting each step of a TIPA assessment project (Definition, Preparation, Assessment, Analysis, Results Presentation and Closure).

A further description of the TIPA assessment methodology can be found in the "ITSM Process Assessment Supporting ITIL®" book, published by Van Haren Publishing.