A critical service has failed and a fix must be applied as soon as possible. Which statement correctly describes how change enablement treats this emergency change?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail medium
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The options
Not correct It must wait for the next scheduled change authority meeting so that it can be assessed properly
Wrong. Waiting for the routine cycle defeats the point of the emergency type; the expedited route exists so urgent work does not queue behind the calendar.
Not correct Assessment and authorisation are waived entirely, because urgency overrides control
Wrong. This is the dangerous misreading. Compressing an assessment is not the same as abandoning it — an unassessed emergency fix is how one incident becomes two.
Not correct It is reclassified as a standard change so that it can proceed under existing pre-authorisation
Wrong. Standard changes are pre-authorised precisely because they are routine, documented and low risk. An unplanned urgent fix meets none of those conditions.
Correct Assessment and authorisation are compressed and expedited, often through a separate change authority, rather than skipped
Correct. Emergency changes still require authorisation; the difference is speed. Organisations typically nominate a smaller, faster change authority so a decision can be reached quickly.
Why
Emergency changes must be implemented as soon as possible — to resolve an incident or apply an urgent security fix, for example. What changes is the tempo, not the existence of control: assessment and authorisation are expedited, frequently via a distinct change authority, and testing or documentation may be reduced or completed afterwards. Authorisation is never simply omitted.
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