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?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 2. The ITIL guiding principles medium
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The options
Not correct Optimize and automate
A shared tool might follow later, but the principle concerns making work effective before applying technology, not the transparency of work in progress.
Not correct Think and work holistically
Closely related, but that principle is about integrating services and the four dimensions into a coherent whole. The specific issues of hidden work and siloed teams are what 'collaborate and promote visibility' names.
Correct Collaborate and promote visibility
Correct. Work that is hidden is poorly understood and easily deprioritized, and involving the right people across teams is what prevents duplicated effort.
Not correct Focus on value
Duplicated work wastes value, but this principle is about ensuring everything done links to value for the service consumer and other stakeholders, not about surfacing work status.
Why
'Collaborate and promote visibility' has two halves that support each other: involving the right people produces better buy-in and information, and making work and its status visible prevents poor decisions. Work that is not visible is easily assumed to be unimportant and starved of resources.
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 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
- 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? 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