During an improvement review, a team finds that a weekly reconciliation report is produced, circulated and archived, but no one uses it for any decision. Which guiding principle states directly that an activity like this should be eliminated?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 2. The ITIL guiding principles medium
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The options
Not correct Focus on value
Related in spirit, since the report creates no value, but 'focus on value' is about linking work to value for the service consumer and other stakeholders. The specific instruction to delete activities that yield no useful outcome belongs to 'keep it simple and practical'.
Not correct Optimize and automate
Adjacent and often applied next, but that principle is about making an activity as effective as possible and then applying technology. Here the activity is being removed entirely rather than improved.
Correct Keep it simple and practical
Correct. The principle states that if a process, service, action or metric fails to produce a useful outcome or contribute to value, it should be eliminated.
Not correct Think and work holistically
This principle would caution against removing something without understanding its wider effect, but it does not supply the rationale for elimination itself.
Why
'Keep it simple and practical' asks for the minimum number of steps needed to achieve an objective, and is explicit that anything which does not lead to a useful outcome or contribute to value creation should be eliminated. An unread report is exactly that.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 2
- What it says
- Keep it simple and practical: eliminate any activity or metric that produces no useful outcome or value.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 2 and space the ones you get wrong.