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?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail 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
Correct Problem management loses the data it needs to spot recurring issues through trend analysis
Correct. Problem identification depends on analysing incident records for patterns and duplicates. Records without symptoms, categories or diagnosis make recurring faults invisible, so the underlying causes are never addressed.
Not correct The incidents cannot be considered resolved until the record is complete
Resolution is a matter of service being restored to the user, not of record quality. The record is poor, but the incident really was resolved — which is precisely why the loss of information is easy to overlook.
Not correct The incidents will automatically be reclassified as service requests
Nothing reclassifies an incident based on how it was documented. Classification depends on whether service was unexpectedly degraded, not on the quality of the notes.
Not correct Users will be unable to use self-help channels for similar issues in future
Self-help availability is a design decision about channels and knowledge, not an automatic consequence of a thin record — though weak records certainly make good self-help content harder to write.
Why
Incident records carry more value after the incident than during it. Good-quality data — timeline, symptoms, category, related configuration items and records — is the raw material for trend analysis in problem identification and for knowledge that speeds up future restorations.
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
- 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? 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
- 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