A service provider adds an elaborate self-service portal feature that no user has asked for and that does not help users achieve any outcome they care about. Which guiding principle has been neglected?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 2. The ITIL guiding principles medium
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The options
Correct Focus on value
Correct. Everything the organization does should map, directly or indirectly, to value for the service consumer and other stakeholders, and that requires knowing who is being served and what they consider valuable.
Not correct Keep it simple and practical
The feature does add complexity, so this principle is also relevant, but the primary failure is building something with no link to consumer value at all rather than building it in too many steps.
Not correct Collaborate and promote visibility
Involving users might have exposed the gap, but the principle itself is about stakeholder involvement and transparency of work, not about whether an output creates value.
Not correct Progress iteratively with feedback
Feedback would have caught this sooner, yet the neglected idea is the value link itself; iteration is the mechanism, not the missing principle.
Why
'Focus on value' requires the organization to know who is being served, to understand the consumer's perspective of value including their experience, and to ensure every activity links back to value for stakeholders. A feature nobody wants fails that test at the first step.
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
- A team has been asked to replace an ageing service desk tool. Before designing anything, the team inventories the existing tool's integrations, workflows and data, and finds that several components work well and can be carried forward. Which guiding principle is the team applying? machine-checked
- An organization decides to introduce robotic process automation for its user access request handling. Its ITIL adviser insists that the approval steps are first reviewed and the redundant ones removed. What is the reasoning behind this advice? machine-checked
- 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
- 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