Which statement best describes the purpose of the continual improvement practice?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail easy
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The options
Not correct To ensure that changes to products and services are made safely and successfully
That is change enablement. It governs how a change is made; continual improvement decides which improvements are worth making at all.
Not correct To make sure that failures are investigated so that their underlying causes are removed
That is problem management. Removing causes of incidents is one source of improvement, but continual improvement is far broader and is not triggered only by failure.
Correct To keep the organization's practices and services aligned with changing business needs through ongoing improvement of products, services and practices
Correct. The practice exists to maintain alignment with a moving target — business needs change, so products, services and practices must improve continually.
Not correct To measure and report on service performance against agreed targets
That leans towards service level management and measurement and reporting. Measurement informs improvement, but the purpose of the practice is the improving, not the measuring.
Why
Continual improvement is defined by alignment: business needs shift, and without deliberate ongoing improvement the organization's services and ways of working drift out of step with them. The distractors are practices that improvement frequently works with — problem management, change enablement, service level management — but each has a narrower purpose.
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
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- 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