ITIL ITIL Foundation (syllabus 2011) Questions and Answers

In order to be aligned to customer outcomes and expectations, SLM requires focus and effort to engage and listen to the requirements, issues, concerns, and daily needs of customers:

• Engagement is needed to understand and confirm the actual ongoing needs and requirements of customers, not simply what is interpreted by the service provider or has been agreed several years before. ITIL4 refers to value as being co-created, since it needs the input and validation of customers.
• Listening is important as a relationship-building and trust-building activity, to show customers that they are valued and understood. This helps to move the provider away from always being in ‘solution mode’ and to build new, more constructive partnerships. Each customer is unique, and the service provider must not have a one-size-fits-all approach.

The activities of engaging and listening provide a great opportunity to build improved relationships and to focus on what really needs to be delivered. They also give service delivery staff an experience-based understanding of the day-to-day work that is done with their technology, enabling them to deliver a more business-focused service. When the customer is engaged and listened to, they feel valued and their perception of the service and service management activities improves.

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itil-service-level-management/

Costs are the amount of money spent on a specific activity or resource. From the service consumer’s perspective, there are two types of cost involved in service relationships:

• Costs removed from the consumer by the service (a part of the value proposition). For example, for a car sharing service, the customer does not pay for the actual cost of purchasing the car.

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itil-key-concepts-service-management/

The second step is to conduct an objective current-state assessment of existing services and service management practices. This should include consideration of the users’ perception of the value being received, along with a review of people’s competencies and skills, the processes and procedures involved, the capabilities of the available technological solutions and the prevailing organizational culture. The success of an improvement initiative depends on a clear and accurate understanding of the starting point and the required impact of the initiative.

For example, an organization can measure the current net promoter score (NPS) from a customer satisfaction survey, conduct a benchmark survey against its competitors or review findings of operational statistics or audit reports to understand its current state. If this step is skipped, the current state will not be understood and there will not be an objective baseline measurement against which improvement can be measured.

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itil-continual-improvement/

There are many ways in which practices and services can be optimized. Regardless of the specific techniques, the path to optimization follows these high-level steps:

• Understand and agree the context in which the proposed optimization exists
• Assess the current state of the proposed optimization
• Agree what the future state and priorities of the organization should be, focusing on simplification and value
• Ensure the optimization has the appropriate level of stakeholder engagement and commitment
• Execute the improvements in an iterative way
• Continually monitor the impact of optimization

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itil-guiding-principles/

A service request is defined as a request from a user or a user’s authorized representative that initiates a service action which has been agreed as a normal part of service delivery.

The purpose of the service request management practice is to support the agreed quality of a service by handling all pre-defined, user-initiated service requests in an effective and user-friendly manner. Service request management is dependent upon well-designed processes and procedures, which are operationalized through tracking and automation tools to maximize the efficiency of the practice. To be handled optimally, service request management should follow these guidelines:

• Service requests and their fulfilment should be standardized and automated to the greatest degree possible.
• Policies should define which service requests will be fulfilled with limited or even no additional approvals so that fulfilment can be streamlined.
• The expectations of users regarding fulfilment times and costs should be clearly set, based on what the organization can realistically deliver.
• Opportunities for improvement should be identified and implemented to produce faster fulfilment times and take advantage of automation.

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itil-service-request-management/

Individual metrics without a specified service context are unhelpful. They should relate to defined outcomes and not simply operational metrics. This can be achieved with balanced bundles of metrics, such as customer satisfaction and key business outcomes.

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itil-service-level-management/#:~:text=Service%20Level%20Agreements%20(SLAs) &text=Individual%20metrics%20without%20a%20specified,satisfaction%20and%20key%20business%20outcomes.

IT asset is any financially valuable component that can contribute to the delivery of an IT product or service. The scope of IT asset management typically includes all software, hardware, networking, cloud services, and client devices

https://wiki.process-symphony.com.au/framework/lifecycle/process/it-asset-management-itil-4/#:~:text=IT%20asset%20is%20any%20financially,cloud%20services%2C%20and%20client%20devices .

The organizations and people dimension sets out the people aspects of service management to be considered when designing, operating and changing service offerings. People include employees, managers, executives, customers, supplier employees, or anybody else who is involved in the creation or consumption of services.

https://assyst.ifs.com/blog/what-are-the-four-dimensions-of-itil-4

https://assyst.ifs.com/blog/the-7-guiding-principles-of-itil-4-0

Don't over-engineer solutions. Think about what you can do now.

Like focus on value, this principle is heavily focused on the prevention of waste. Waste correlates with complexity. Higher complexity means there are more opportunities for waste to creep into a system.

Focus on delivering the desired outcome, not building the most elegant and elaborate solution. Use the minimum number of steps to deliver that outcome, ensuring you are not over-processing (delivering quality above and beyond what is required).

• Emergency changes. These are changes that must be implemented as soon as possible; for example, to resolve an incident or implement a security patch. Emergency changes are not typically included in a change schedule, and the process for assessment and authorization is expedited to ensure they can be implemented quickly. As far as possible, emergency changes should be subject to the same testing, assessment, and authorization as normal changes, but it may be acceptable to defer some documentation until after the change has been implemented, and sometimes it will be necessary to implement the change with less testing due to time constraints. There may also be a separate change authority for emergency changes, typically including a small number of senior managers who understand the business risks involved.”

https://itsm.tools/why-what-change-management/#:~:text=Emergency%20changes. &text=Emergency%20changes%20are%20not%20typically,they%20can%20be%20implemented%20quickly.

The purpose of the service configuration management practice is to ensure that accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services, and the CIs that support them, is available when and where it is needed. This includes information on how CIs are configured and the relationships between them.

https://wiki.process-symphony.com.au/framework/lifecycle/process/service-configuration-management-itil-4/

This is one of the most important questions for continual improvement. This question helps to define measurable targets for the IT service provider that will help to reach the vision of the company in the long-term. At this stage, we look at the identified key performance indicators from the previous step and determine what values we want to target for each of these indicators. This decision must be made with the business’s vision in mind, but also with a sense of what is practically possible.

https://blog.masterofproject.com/continual-improvement-model/

Over time, the focus of service desks has broadened from simply logging and resolving technical issues, to proving more comprehensive support for people and the business. They are increasingly being used to get various matters arranged, explained, and coordinated. The service desk has a major influence on user experience and how the service provider is perceived by the users. By understanding and acting on the business context of transactional activity (i.e. logging tickets), the service desk is better placed to add value to the organization.

A change is defined as the addition, modification, or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on services

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itil-change-enablement/#:~:text=A%20change%20is%20defined%20as,or%20indirect%20effect%20on%20services.

The change schedule is used to help plan changes, assist in communication, avoid conflicts, and assign resources. It can also be used after changes have been deployed to provide information needed for incident management, problem management, and improvement planning

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itil-change-enablement/#:~:text=The%20change%20schedule%20is%20used,problem%20management%2C%20and%20improvement%20planning .

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Problem Control. Problem control activities include problem analysis and documenting workarounds and known errors.

Just like incidents, problems will be prioritized based on the risk they pose in terms of probability and impact to services. Focus should be given to problems that have highest risk to services and service management.

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itil-problem-management/#:~:text=2.,probability%20and%20impact%20to%20services .

Nonrepudiation provides an assurance that the sender of data is provided with proof of delivery and the recipient is provided with proof of the sender's identity, so neither can later deny having processed the data. Further, this concept can apply to any activity, not just the sending and receiving of data; in a more general sense, it is a mechanism to prove that an activity was performed and by whom. Nonrepudiation is typically comprised of authentication, auditing/logging, and cryptography services.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/nonrepudiation

The purpose of the release management practice is to make new and changed services and features available for use.

Release: A version of a service or other configuration item, or a collection of configuration items, that is made available for use.

https://wiki.process-symphony.com.au/framework/lifecycle/process/release-management-itil-4/

The purpose of the improve value chain activity is to ensure continual improvement of products, services, and practices across all value chain activities and the four dimensions of service management.

https://wiki.process-symphony.com.au/framework/lifecycle/service-value-systemitil-4/#:~:text=The%20purpose%20of%20the%20improve,four%20dimensions%20of%20service%20management .