An internal IT department agrees with the internal network team that network faults affecting the payroll service will be picked up within 15 minutes. There is no external party involved. What is this agreement normally called?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail hard
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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 An operational level agreement
Correct. An OLA is an agreement between the service provider and another part of the same organization that supports delivery of a service.
Not correct A service level agreement
An SLA is the customer-facing agreement between the service provider and the customer of the service. This agreement is internal to the provider organization and supports the SLA rather than being one.
Not correct An underpinning contract
An underpinning contract is with an external supplier. The scenario states explicitly that no external party is involved.
Not correct A service level requirement
A service level requirement is a customer need expressed before an agreement exists — an input to negotiation, not a commitment between internal teams.
Why
Three commitments are easy to confuse. The SLA is with the customer. The operational level agreement is with another internal group whose work underpins the SLA. The underpinning contract is the equivalent commitment obtained from an external supplier. A service level requirement is not an agreement at all — it is the stated need that an agreement is later negotiated against.
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