A team designing a new access request workflow tries to build a path for every rare exception into the main flow. The result is a form of 40 conditional questions that nearly every user must work through in order to make a routine request. What does 'keep it simple and practical' advise here?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 2. The ITIL guiding principles hard
Draft — not checked yet. This question was written from the published exam objectives and cites the clause it comes from, but nobody has yet read it against that clause and signed for it.
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The options
Not correct Retain every question already in use, because each one encodes knowledge that would otherwise be lost
That is a misreading of 'start where you are', which asks what existing material is worth reusing, not that everything currently in place must be preserved.
Not correct Automate all 40 questions so that users spend less time working through them
That is 'optimize and automate' applied in the wrong order. Automating a needlessly complex flow preserves the complexity and makes it faster; the question here is whether the steps should exist at all.
Not correct Keep the exceptions in the main flow and gather user feedback after each release so the wording can be refined
That is 'progress iteratively with feedback'. It is a reasonable way to improve a design over time, but it leaves the steps that add no value for most users in place.
Correct Design the flow for the majority of cases and handle the exceptions separately, adding complexity only where it produces a worthwhile outcome
Correct. The principle says to use the minimum number of steps needed to accomplish the objective, and to eliminate anything that fails to produce a useful outcome. Rare cases are handled as exceptions rather than designed into everyone's path.
Why
The distractors here are all real guiding principles applied to the wrong problem, which is the usual way this goes wrong in practice. Keep it simple and practical owns the judgement about whether a step should exist; optimize and automate speaks to how well the steps that survive are executed. Doing them in the wrong order is how organizations end up with fast waste.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 2
- What it says
- Use the minimum number of steps necessary to accomplish an objective; if a process, service, action or metric fails to provide value or produce a useful outcome, eliminate it.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 2 and space the ones you get wrong.