Which statement about how the ITIL guiding principles are applied is correct?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 2. The ITIL guiding principles hard
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Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
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
Correct The principles interact and reinforce one another, and an organization should not adopt some while ignoring the rest
Correct. The principles are interdependent; ITIL advises considering how each applies and how they relate to each other rather than cherry-picking.
Not correct The principles must be applied strictly in the published order, one after another
They are not a sequence of steps. The only internal ordering worth noting is within 'optimize and automate', where optimization precedes automation.
Not correct Each principle applies to one specific service value chain activity
The principles are universal and apply to all activities and all parts of the service value system, not to one activity each.
Not correct The principles apply only to continual improvement initiatives
They guide all of an organization's actions and decisions at all levels, not only improvement work.
Why
The guiding principles are universal, enduring and interdependent. Every principle should be considered when deciding how to apply the others, and an organization that adopts only the convenient ones loses the balancing effect the set provides.
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