ITIL ITIL-4-Foundation - ITIL 4 Foundation Exam

You need to use all of your resources as effectively and efficiently as you can. This means that you should automate wherever you can, and use people only for tasks that can’t be automated. It also means that you need to think carefully about what you can automate and about the circumstances where only a person will do; and about simplifying those processes you do decide to automate to eliminate wasteful or inefficient steps.

You should always optimize the work BEFORE you automate it, as automating something that is inefficient or ineffective may just result in you doing the wrong thing faster!

https://www.sysaid.com/blog/itil/the-7-guiding-principles-of-itil-4-practical-advice-to-help-you-make-decisions

A service level agreement (SLA) is a documented agreement between a service provider and a customer that identifies both services required and the expected level of service1. A necessity to a successful SLA is that the language and terms used in the SLA should be commonly understood by all parties, to avoid ambiguity, confusion, and disputes2. The other statements are not true because:

Base the SLA on system-based metrics that are useful to the service provider: The SLA should be based on customer-based metrics that are meaningful to the customer and reflect the value of the service2.

In order to promote consistent service, they should be carried forward, unchanged, from one year to the next: The SLA should be reviewed and updated regularly to reflect changing business needs, customer expectations, and service performance2.

Vague targets, such as those related to user experience should be avoided: The SLA should include both quantitative and qualitative targets, such as those related to user experience, satisfaction, and perception, as well as availability, reliability, and security2. References: ITIL Foundation - ITIL 4 Edition, page 16; ITIL® 4 – A Pocket Guide, page 37; ITIL® 4 Practice Guide: Service Level Management, page 8.

The ITIL guiding principle ‘focus on value’ states that everything an organization does should link back, directly or indirectly, to value for itself, its customers, and other stakeholders1. A good way to apply this principle is to understand why services are used by service consumers, what outcomes they enable, and how they contribute to value creation2. This helps to align the service provider’s activities and resources with the needs and preferences of the service consumers3. References: ITIL Foundation - ITIL 4 Edition, page 6; ITIL® 4 – A Pocket Guide, page 24; ITIL® 4 Practice Guide: Focus on Value, page 9.

In ITIL 4, “service consumer” is a generic term that includes three specific roles:

Customer – the person or group that defines the requirements for a service and takes responsibility for the outcomes of service consumption.

User – the person or group that actually uses the service.

Sponsor – the person or group that authorizes the budget for service consumption.

So, specifically:

The customer is responsible for defining the requirements for the service and for the overall outcomes expected from the service.

The sponsor is the one who authorizes the budget (not the customer, unless they are playing both roles in a given context).

The user is the one who uses the service in day-to-day operations.

The service provider (or relevant practices like deployment, request fulfillment, etc.) is responsible for provisioning the service, not the customer.

Now, mapping that to the options:

A. Authorizing the budget for the serviceThis is the responsibility of the sponsor role, not specifically the customer role (though one person may sometimes act as both in practice).

B. Provisioning the serviceThis is the responsibility of the service provider, not the customer.

C. Defining the requirements for the service ✅This matches the ITIL 4 description of the customer role: the customer defines requirements and is accountable for service outcomes. Therefore, this is the correct answer.

D. Using the serviceThis describes the user role, not the customer role (even though a person could be both customer and user in some real-world situations).

ITIL 4 Foundation: Definition of service consumer roles – customer, user, sponsor

In ITIL 4, an incident is defined as an unplanned interruption to a service, or a reduction in the quality of a service. Unplanned maintenance that results in a service being unavailable for two hours clearly represents an unplanned interruption, so it is managed as an incident.

The incident management practice is responsible for:

Managing the lifecycle of incidents

Restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible

Minimizing the negative impact on business operations

That makes incident management the practice most likely to be involved in handling and coordinating communication about this unplanned downtime.

Why the others are less appropriate here:

Problem management aims to manage causes of incidents and reduce their likelihood or impact over time; it does not primarily manage the immediate unplanned outage.

Change enablement manages changes (including emergency changes), but the question is focused on managing the service unavailability to users, which falls under incident management.

Service request management deals with pre-defined, user-initiated requests (such as password resets, information requests), not with unplanned outages.

Therefore, the practice most likely to manage this unplanned unavailability is incident management, so A is correct.

Service management is the term used to describe how organizations manage their services to deliver value to their customers and other stakeholders. Service management requires a set of specialized organizational capabilities, such as processes, roles, tools, and competencies, that enable the effective and efficient delivery of services1. Service management is also a professional practice supported by an extensive body of knowledge, experience, and skills3. References: ITIL Foundation - ITIL 4 Edition, page 2; ITIL® 4 – A Pocket Guide, page 11.

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/

In ITIL 4, the continual improvement practice uses a continual improvement register (CIR) as a key tool to record, prioritize, track, and manage improvement opportunities.

The CIR is used to:

Log improvement ideas from any source

Track these ideas from initial identification through assessment, prioritization, and implementation

Provide visibility of the status and progress of each improvement

Support decision-making about which improvements to pursue and when

This matches option C: “Used to track and manage improvement ideas from identification through to final action.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

A. Used to help plan changes, assist in communication, avoid conflicts, and assign resourcesThis describes aspects of change enablement and change schedule / change calendar, not the continual improvement register.

B. Used to select the right method, model or technique for identifying improvementsMethods and models (such as SWOT, balanced scorecard, etc.) support improvement activities, but the CIR is not about choosing methods; it is about recording and managing improvement opportunities.

D. Used to provide a formal description of one or more services, designed to address the needs of a target consumer groupThis describes a service catalogue entry or service offering, not a continual improvement register.

So, the CIR is specifically a tracking and management tool for improvement ideas, making C the correct answer.

References (Aligned with ITIL 4 Foundation concepts)

ITIL 4 Foundation: Continual improvement practice – use of a continual improvement register to log and manage improvements across their lifecycle

ITIL 4 Foundation: Service management practices overview – distinction between change enablement, service catalogue management, and continual improvement

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/