Several incidents are open at once and the support team must decide which to work on first. On what basis should the order be decided?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail medium
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
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
Not correct The seniority of the person who reported each incident
Seniority may correlate with impact but is not the criterion. Prioritising by who is shouting loudest is exactly what an agreed prioritisation scheme is designed to prevent.
Not correct The order in which the incidents were logged, so that no user waits longer than another
First-in-first-out is fair-looking but ignores impact entirely: a single logged-first password reset would outrank an outage affecting a whole business function.
Correct An agreed classification scheme, so that the incidents with the highest business impact are worked first
Correct. Incidents are categorised and then prioritised using a scheme agreed in advance — normally weighing how much damage the incident does against how quickly that damage grows — so the ordering is consistent rather than personal.
Not correct How technically complex each incident appears to be to diagnose
Complexity affects effort and possible escalation, not priority. A trivial fault with wide business impact still outranks a hard fault affecting nobody.
Why
Priority is derived, not asserted: incidents are categorised and then prioritised using an agreed classification scheme, so that those with the highest business impact are resolved first. Consistency matters more than any individual judgement, because it is what makes agreed target resolution times meaningful.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 7
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 7 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- Which statement best describes what the incident management practice is intended to achieve? machine-checked
- How is an incident defined in ITIL? machine-checked
- A difficult incident is worked on by pulling several specialists from different teams into the same session at the same time; once it becomes clear who is best placed to continue, the others step away. What is this technique called? machine-checked
- Why does an organisation define a separate procedure for major incidents rather than handling them exactly like all other incidents? machine-checked
- A support team routinely fixes incidents by phone and updates the incident record only with the word 'fixed'. What is the most significant consequence of this? machine-checked
- The service desk cannot resolve an incident with the information available to it. According to the incident management practice, what should normally determine where the incident goes next? machine-checked