ITIL Practices: Purpose

Question 1

What is an ITIL Practice?

Answer 1

An ITIL practice is a set of organizational resources designed for performing a work or fulfilling an objective.

Question 2

What are the characteristics of the ITIL practices?

Answer 2

The practices

• Enhance the flexibility of the service value chain.
• Each ITIL practice supports multiple service value chain activities, providing a comprehensive and adaptable toolset for ITSM practitioners.

Question 3

What are the three kind of ITIL practices?

Answer 3

1) General Management practices
2) Service management practices
3) Technical Management Practices

Question 4

What are the four ‘General management practices’?

Answer 4

1) Continual improvement
2) Information Security Management
3) Relationship Management
4) Supplier Management

Question 5

What are the ten ‘Service management practices,

Answer 5

1) IT asset management
2) Monitoring and Event Management
3) Release Management
4) Service Configuration Management
5) Change Enablement
6) Incident Management
7) Problem Management
8) Service desk
9) Service level management
10) Service request management

Question 6

What is the practice for the ‘technical management practices’?

Answer 6

1) Deployment management

Question 7

Explain the ‘continual improvement’ practice?

Answer 7

Aligning the organization’s practices and services with changing business needs through the ongoing identification and improvement of services, service components, practices, or any other element involved in management of products and services.

Question 8

Explain the ‘Information Security Management’ practice?

Answer 8

Protecting information needed by the organization; ensuring confidentiality, integrity, availability, authentication, and non-repudiation.

Question 9

Explain the ‘Relationship Management’ practice

Answer 9

Establishing and fostering the links between the organization and its stakeholders at strategic and tactical levels. Includes identification, analysis, monitoring, and continual improvement of relationships with and between stakeholders.

Question 10

Explain the ‘Supplier Management’ practice

Answer 10

Managing suppliers and their performance to support the seamless provision of quality products and services. Includes creating collaborative relationships with key suppliers to uncover and realize new value and reduce the risk of failure.

Question 11

Explain the ‘IT asset management’ practice.

Answer 11

Planning and management of IT assets to maximize value, control costs, manage risks, support decision
making about purchase, re-use, retirement of assets, and meet regulatory and contractual requirements.

Question 12

Explain the ‘Monitoring and Event Management’ practice.

Answer 12

Observing services and service components and recording and reporting changes of state identified as events. Includes identifying and prioritizing infrastructure, services, business processes, and information security events and establishing the appropriate response to those events.

Question 13

Explain the ‘Release Management’ practice.

Answer 13

Making new and changed services and features available for use.

Question 14

Explain the Service configuration Management practice.

Answer 14

Ensuring accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services, and the configuration items that support them.

Question 15

Explain the ‘Change Enablement’ practice.

Answer 15

Maximizing the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing the change schedule.

Question 16

Explain the ‘Incident Management’ practice.

Answer 16

Minimizing the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible.

Question 17

Explain the ‘Problem Management’ practice.

Answer 17

Reducing the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents and managing workarounds and known errors.

Question 18

Explain the ‘Service desk’ practice.

Answer 18

Capturing the demand for incident resolution and service requests. Service Desk is a point of communication for the service provider with all its users.

Question 19

Explain the ‘Service level management’ practice.

Answer 19

Setting clear business-based targets for service performance, so that delivery can be assessed, monitored and managed against these targets.

Question 20

Explain the ‘Service Request Management’ practice.

Answer 20

Handling all predefined, user-initiated service requests in an effective and user-friendly manner.

Question 21

Explain the ‘Deployment Management’ practice.

Answer 21

Moving new or changed hardware, software, documentation, processes, or any other component to live environments. Deployment management may also be involved in deploying components to other environments for testing or staging.

Question 22

What is the scope of the continual improvement practice?

Answer 22

The scope of the continual improvement practice includes the development of improvement-related methods and techniques and the propagation of a continual improvement culture across the organization.

Question 23

What are the 8 key activities of continual improvement?

Answer 23

1) Encourage continual improvement across the organization
ƒ2) Develop business cases for improvement action ƒ
3) Plan and implement improvements
4) Measure and evaluate improvement results
5) Coordinate improvement activities across the
organization.
6) Secure time and budget for continual improvement
7) Identify and log improvement opportunities
ƒ8) Assess and prioritize improvement opportunities

Question 24

Who is responsible for continual improvement?

Answer 24

Continual improvement is the responsibility of everyone in the organization and the partners and suppliers related to organization.

Question 25

Where can the approaches of continual improvement be found?

Answer 25

Approaches to continual improvement can be found in many places, including Lean and Agile methods.

Question 26

What is the scope of change enablement?

Answer 26

The scope of change enablement typically includes all IT infrastructure, applications, documentation, processes, supplier relationships, and all that might directly or indirectly impact a product or service.

Question 27

What balance should be made when using change enablement?

Answer 27

balance the need to make beneficial changes that deliver additional value with the need to protect customers and users from adverse effect of change.

Question 28

What are the three types of change?

Answer 28

Three types of change that are each managed in different ways are

• standard changes
• normal changes
• emergency changes

For change enablement to be effective and efficient, it is essential that the correct change authority is assigned to each type of change.

Question 29

What is the change schedule under change enablement?

Answer 29

The change schedule helps to plan changes, assist in communication, avoid conflicts, and assign resources.

Question 30

What are the 4 key activities of incident management?

Answer 30

1) Logging and managing the incidents
2) Agreeing, documenting and communicating the target resolution times ƒ
3) Prioritizing the incidents based on agreed classification
ƒ4) Diagnosing, escalating, and resolving the incident

Question 31

What are the three practices an organization should design incident management by?

Answer 31

1) Appropriately managing and allocating resources to different types of incidents
2) Storing information about incidents in incident records
3) Providing good-quality updates on incidents

Incidents may be diagnosed and resolved by people in many different groups, depending on the complexity of the issue or the incident type.

Question 32

What are the three phases in problem management?

Answer 32

1) problem identification
2) problem control
3) error control

Question 33

Explain problem identification as the first phase of problem management.

Answer 33

Problem Identification
Identifying and logging problems.
ƒ- Perform trend analysis of incident records.
ƒ- Detect duplicate and recurring issues.
- Identify a risk that an incident could recur.
ƒ- Analyze information received from suppliers, partners and internal software developers.

Question 34

Explain problem control as the second phase of problem management.

Answer 34

Problem Control
Analyzing problems and documenting workarounds and known errors.
ƒ- Problems are prioritized based on the risk that they pose, and are managed as risks based on their potential impact and probability.
ƒ- When a problem cannot be resolved, a workaround needs to be found and documented. Workarounds are documented in problem records.

Question 35

Explain Error control as the third phase of problem management.

Answer 35

Error Control
Managing known errors.
ƒ - Error control involves identifying potential permanent solutions.These permanent solutions may involve a change request.

Question 36

What are the characteristics of service request management?

Answer 36

Handling all pre-defined, user-initiated service requests in an effective and comprehensible manner.
ƒ- Service requests are pre-defined and pre-agreed, they should be formalized with a clear, standard procedure for initiation, approval, fulfilment, and management.
ƒ- The fulfilment of service requests may include changes to services or their components. These changes usually fall under category of standard changes.
ƒ- Service requests form a normal part of service delivery, and not a failure/degradation of service.

Question 37

What are the 4 characteristics of service desk?

Answer 37

• Service desk acts as the entry point/single point of contact for the IT or service organization.
  ƒ- Service desk should have practical understanding of the wider organization, its business processes, and users.
  ƒ- Service desk works in close collaboration with the support and development teams to present and deliver a ‘joined up’ approach to users and customers.
  ƒ- A service desk may work at a single or centralized location or it may act as a virtual desk that enables agents to work from different geographical locations

Question 38

What are the two characteristics of service level management?

Answer 38

• The service level management practice involves the definition, documentation, and active management of service levels and provide end to end visibility of the organization’s services.
  ƒ- Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is a tool used to agree on the service between the provider and customer. SLAs must relate to a defined service in the service catalogue and should relate to defined outcomes.