A user contacts the service desk to ask for a standard laptop of the type the organisation already offers to staff in their role. How should this be handled?
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 As a problem, because the underlying cause of the user's difficulty needs investigating
A problem is a cause of one or more incidents. There are no incidents here and there is nothing to diagnose — the situation is fully understood.
Not correct As an incident, because until the laptop arrives the user cannot work at their expected level
No service has been interrupted or degraded. Reduced productivity for want of something never yet provided is not an unplanned loss of an agreed service, and treating it as an incident would distort incident reporting.
Correct As a service request, because it is a user-initiated action that has been agreed as a normal part of service delivery
Correct. The provider has already decided that staff in this role may have this equipment, so the workflow, approvals and fulfilment times are all pre-defined. That is exactly what makes it a request.
Not correct As a normal change, because new equipment is being added to the environment
Change enablement may be involved behind the scenes in how the standard build is defined, but a request for something already pre-approved is fulfilled through service request management, not raised individually as a change.
Why
The test is not what the user wants but whether it was agreed in advance as normal service delivery. Because provision of a standard laptop to that role is pre-defined and pre-agreed, it is a service request with a known workflow, not a failure to be diagnosed.
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