Seven ITIL practices in detail

The largest objective on the paper. Seven practices are examined in detail rather than by purpose alone: incident management, service request management, problem management, change enablement, service desk, service level management and continual improvement. Objective 7 of ITIL 4 Foundation, worth 47.5% of the exam.

Share of the exam

47.5%

Questions in a real sitting

roughly 19 of 40

Questions in this bank

57

Signed for by a person

0

Machine-checked only

57

How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.

What this objective covers

The 57 questions written for this objective cite 1 ITIL 4 syllabus clause (7).

They break down as 57 single-answer questions.

What this objective is really about

This is nearly half the exam, and it is detail rather than definition. For each of the seven practices you need the purpose, the vocabulary, the phases or categories inside it, and — most of all — where its boundary with the neighbouring practice runs. Scenario questions here rarely name the practice; they describe a situation and expect you to route it.

Incident, request and problem

The routing test is simple to state and easy to get wrong under time pressure. Has something failed unexpectedly? That is an incident, and the objective is to restore service fast — a workaround with the cause still unknown is a perfectly successful outcome. Is this a routine thing the provider already agreed to supply? That is a service request, and because it is pre-defined it can be standardised, automated and given predictable fulfilment targets. Is the question why something keeps failing? That is problem management, which owns actual and potential causes.

Incidents and problems coexist as separate records with separate lifecycles. A problem never replaces an incident, and an incident is not held open until its cause is understood. Problem management runs in three phases — identification, control, error control — and the boundary between the last two is the known error: control produces the analysis and the workaround, error control then manages the known error over time and periodically reconsiders whether a permanent fix has become worthwhile.

Swarming is worth knowing by name: many people work an incident at once until it becomes clear who should carry on, as opposed to escalating it from tier to tier.

Change enablement and the service desk

Three change types: standard, normal and emergency. The classification is about the authorisation route, not the size. A standard change is pre-authorised — the risk assessment happened once, when the procedure was written — so individual instances need no fresh approval, and re-approving each one would defeat the category. A normal change goes through the full assessment and authorisation path defined by the applicable change model, and it spans the whole risk range rather than being limited to low risk. An emergency change is expedited, often through a smaller change authority, but it is never unauthorised.

The change authority is whoever holds the right to authorise a given change — a person, a peer reviewer or a board, assigned by the change model. The change schedule is a planning and communication tool that helps avoid conflicts and assign resources; it authorises nothing, and emergency changes are typically not on it when raised.

The service desk is defined by its position as the single point of contact for users, not by being a place or a team. Distributed staff, multiple channels and automation are all compatible with that. Its capability profile leans towards empathy, communication and business understanding rather than deep technical specialism — and as routine contacts move to self-service, the human contacts that remain get harder, so the skill requirement goes up rather than down.

Service level management and continual improvement

Service level management sets targets in business terms and then assesses delivery against them. Its characteristic failure has a name worth remembering: the watermelon SLA, green on the report and red for the customer, because the agreed measure was a component metric rather than anything to do with the outcome. The fix is a balanced bundle of outcome-related measures, not a stricter version of the wrong number. A successful agreement also has to be an actual agreement, reached by engagement with the consumer, and it has to relate to a defined service.

Three commitments are easy to confuse. The SLA is with the customer. An operational level agreement is with another part of the same organisation. An underpinning contract is with an external supplier. A service level requirement is not an agreement at all — it is the stated need before one is negotiated.

Continual improvement has a seven-step model: what is the vision, where are we now, where do we want to be, how do we get there, take action, did we get there, how do we keep the momentum going. The last step is the one organisations skip, and the symptom is an improvement that was verified as successful and then quietly regressed. Improvement is everyone's responsibility; a dedicated team may coordinate it, but if it becomes the only place improvement happens, most opportunities are never surfaced.

Lessons in this objective

The objective cut into the pieces the blueprint declares. Each one has the material written out and the questions that test it.

• Incident management, priority and major incidents
• Incident records, escalation and service requests
• Requests versus incidents, and finding problems
• Workarounds, known errors and problem control
• Change enablement and the three types of change
• Change authorities and the change schedule
• Authorisation routes and what a service desk is
• Service desk channels and user experience
• Service level agreements and honest targets
• Measurement, engagement and underpinning agreements
• Continual improvement and its model
• Who improves, which principles apply, and the value chain

Drill this objective

The trainer can run a short practice set drawn from this objective alone, which is what the weight column above is for: revise the heavy objectives first.

Practise Seven ITIL practices in detail

Questions on this objective (page 1 of 3)

• Which statement best describes what the incident management practice is intended to achieve? machine-checked
• How is an incident defined in ITIL? machine-checked
• Several incidents are open at once and the support team must decide which to work on first. On what basis should the order be decided? machine-checked
• A difficult incident is worked on by pulling several specialists from different teams into the same session at the same time; once it becomes clear who is best placed to continue, the others step away. What is this technique called? machine-checked
• Why does an organisation define a separate procedure for major incidents rather than handling them exactly like all other incidents? machine-checked
• A support team routinely fixes incidents by phone and updates the incident record only with the word 'fixed'. What is the most significant consequence of this? machine-checked
• The service desk cannot resolve an incident with the information available to it. According to the incident management practice, what should normally determine where the incident goes next? machine-checked
• Which statement best describes what the service request management practice is intended to achieve? machine-checked
• A user contacts the service desk to ask for a standard laptop of the type the organisation already offers to staff in their role. How should this be handled? machine-checked
• Why does ITIL say that service requests and their fulfilment should be standardised and automated to the greatest degree possible? machine-checked
• An organisation logs service requests as low-priority incidents so that everything sits in one queue. What is the strongest ITIL-based objection to this? machine-checked
• Which of the following would NOT normally be handled through the service request management practice? machine-checked
• A problem management team is asked how problems come to be identified in the first place. Which answer best reflects the practice as ITIL describes it? machine-checked
• An analyst reviews several months of incident records and notices a repeating pattern of similar failures that had each been resolved individually. Which phase of problem management is this activity part of? machine-checked
• What is a known error? machine-checked
• What is a workaround? machine-checked
• A known error has been recorded with a workaround in place. The team periodically re-examines its impact, the cost of the incidents it causes, and whether a permanent fix has become worthwhile. Which phase of problem management is this? machine-checked
• An organisation has more open problems than it can analyse. What does the problem management practice say about how to proceed? machine-checked
• A business application fails for the third time this month. The service desk restarts it, users get back to work within ten minutes, and nobody knows why it keeps failing. Which combination correctly describes what has happened and what should happen next? machine-checked
• A programme manager assumes that change enablement is the practice responsible for preparing staff for a new way of working, including communications, training and dealing with resistance. Why is this assumption wrong? machine-checked

Practise Seven ITIL practices in detail

The other objectives in ITIL 4 Foundation

• 1. Key concepts of service management — 12.5% of the exam
• 2. The ITIL guiding principles — 15% of the exam
• 3. The four dimensions of service management — 5% of the exam
• 4. The ITIL service value system — 2.5% of the exam
• 5. The service value chain — 5% of the exam
• 6. Purpose and key terms of 15 ITIL practices — 12.5% of the exam