A team beginning an improvement is tempted to declare the current process a failure and design a replacement from a blank sheet. Which guiding principle most directly challenges this, and at which step of the continual improvement model does it bite hardest?
ITIL 4 Foundation, objective 7. Seven ITIL practices in detail hard
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The options
Not correct Think and work holistically, at the 'Take action' step
Working holistically warns against treating components in isolation. Relevant in general, but the error here is ignoring the existing state, not fragmenting the work.
Not correct Keep it simple and practical, at the 'How do we get there?' step
This principle is about eliminating steps that produce no value; it applies during planning, but it does not address the specific error of discarding the current state unexamined.
Correct Start where you are, at the 'Where are we now?' step
Correct. The principle says to assess what already exists and reuse what is usable, which is precisely the work of the baseline step.
Not correct Focus on value, at the 'What is the vision?' step
Focus on value does belong near the vision step, but it addresses whether the improvement serves the consumer, not whether the current state was properly assessed first.
Why
'Start where you are' says not to start over without first assessing what is already in place, because existing services, processes and people often contain much that can be reused. That assessment is exactly the 'Where are we now?' step, where measurement of the current state establishes the baseline. The other principles are real, but none of them names the failure described.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- ITIL 4 syllabus clause 7
- What it says
- The guiding principle 'start where you are' supports the continual improvement model's assessment of the current state.
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a set from objective 7 and space the ones you get wrong.