A newly appointed service owner finds that different departments have contradictory views of where the organization's services stand today and where they are heading. Which service value chain activity is intended to resolve this?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 5. The service value chain medium
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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
Not correct Design and transition
Design and transition ensures products and services continually meet expectations for quality, costs and time to market. It delivers against direction rather than setting the shared understanding of it.
Not correct Improve
Improve exists to ensure continual improvement of products, services and practices across all value chain activities. It acts on things once direction is understood; establishing the shared view of vision and current status is plan.
Not correct Engage
Engage provides a good understanding of stakeholder needs and maintains relationships and transparency with stakeholders. The problem here is internal alignment on vision and status, which plan owns.
Correct Plan
Correct. The purpose of plan is to ensure a shared understanding of the vision, current status and improvement direction for all four dimensions and all products and services across the organization.
Why
Plan is the value chain activity whose stated purpose is a shared understanding of vision, current status and improvement direction, spanning all four dimensions and all products and services. The commonly confused neighbour, improve, is about continually improving products, services and practices — a different job that presumes direction already exists.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 5.2
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 5 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- Which value chain activity has the purpose of ensuring a good understanding of stakeholder needs, together with transparency and continual engagement and good relationships with all stakeholders? machine-checked
- Which value chain activity is responsible for ensuring that service components are available when and where they are needed, and that they meet agreed specifications? machine-checked
- A review of user satisfaction data leads a team to change how a service is monitored and to refine the practice used to handle recurring faults. Which value chain activity does this work belong to, and how does it differ from its nearest neighbour? machine-checked
- Which statement most accurately describes the relationship between the service value chain activities and value streams? machine-checked
- A provider is changing an existing service so that it will continue to meet agreed expectations for quality, cost and time to market, and is preparing to move the changed service into live use. Which value chain activity best describes this? machine-checked