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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How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
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
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 2 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
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- A programme has been running for eleven months with no deliverable released, because the team intends to hand over the complete solution in one go. Which guiding principle is being ignored? machine-checked
- A manager plans a service improvement using only the monthly summary reports produced by the supplier, and does not observe how the service actually runs. Which guiding principle most directly cautions against this? machine-checked
- A change to a payment service is planned by the application team alone. When deployed, it breaks a downstream reporting service and leaves the support team without updated documentation. Which guiding principle would most likely have prevented this? machine-checked
- Two teams each maintain their own private backlog and status spreadsheet. Work is regularly duplicated and urgent items are deprioritized because leadership cannot see them. Which guiding principle addresses this situation? machine-checked