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?
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
Not correct Its priority is automatically raised so that it receives more resources
Escalation and prioritisation are separate. Moving an incident to a more expert team does not change its impact or urgency, and inflating priority on escalation would corrupt the prioritisation scheme.
Not correct It is passed to problem management, which takes ownership of restoring the service
Problem management owns causes, not restoration. Handing an unresolved incident to problem management would leave the user without service while an investigation runs.
Correct It is routed to a support team with the relevant expertise, typically based on the incident's category
Correct. Categorisation exists partly to drive routing: the category identifies the kind of fault, which identifies the team most likely to be able to diagnose it.
Not correct It is closed and the user is asked to raise a service request instead
A service request is a pre-agreed normal service action. An unresolved failure is not converted into a request; doing so would hide the incident from reporting and from trend analysis.
Why
Escalation in incident management is about reaching the right knowledge, not about signalling importance. Incidents may be resolved by the user through self-help, by the service desk, by a specialist support team, or by a supplier — and the category drives which of those is engaged.
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
- 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