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?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 2. The ITIL guiding principles medium
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The options
Not correct Progress iteratively with feedback
Smaller increments might have limited the blast radius, but the root failure is treating the payment service as an isolated component rather than part of a whole.
Not correct Keep it simple and practical
This principle is about removing unnecessary steps. Following it in isolation would not have revealed the downstream dependency.
Not correct Start where you are
This principle would have prompted an assessment of existing assets, but the failure here is a missed interdependency across services and teams, which is the holistic view.
Correct Think and work holistically
Correct. No service, practice or component stands alone; the principle requires an integrated view of how all parts and all four dimensions interact to deliver value end to end.
Why
'Think and work holistically' states that no service, practice, process, department or supplier stands alone. Outputs must be coordinated across the whole organization and across the four dimensions of service management; ignoring downstream services and the people who support them is the classic breach of this principle.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 2
- What it says
- Think and work holistically: no service or component stands alone; work must be integrated and coordinated across the whole.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 2 and space the ones you get wrong.