Free ITIL ITIL-4-Foundation Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 3

In ITIL 4, the continual improvement practice focuses on:

Aligning services and practices with changing business needs

Identifying and prioritizing improvement opportunities

Using appropriate methods and tools to assess and plan improvements

ITIL 4 explicitly notes that organizations should develop skills in assessment and improvement techniques, such as SWOT analysis and balanced scorecard reviews, to support continual improvement. These methods help assess the current state, opportunities, risks, and performance from multiple perspectives, and they feed into the continual improvement model.

Why the others are incorrect:

Incident management concentrates on restoring service after incidents; it does not specifically emphasize methodologies like SWOT or balanced scorecard.

Service request management deals with handling user requests efficiently and effectively, not with improvement analysis techniques.

Change enablement is about controlling and enabling beneficial changes; while it may use some analysis, it is not the practice highlighted for competencies in SWOT and balanced scorecard.

Therefore, the practice that encourages organizations to develop competencies in techniques such as SWOT analysis and balanced scorecard review is continual improvement, making B the correct answer.

In ITIL 4, the service desk practice is defined as the single point of contact between the service provider and its users. One of its key responsibilities is to ensure that:

Users can contact the service provider easily

There are multiple communication channels available (phone, email, chat, self-service portal, mobile app, etc.)

Calls, messages, and contacts from users about incidents, service requests, and inquiries are captured and handled

This means the service desk is the practice that guarantees users have a range of access channels to report problems and requests.

Why the other options are not correct:

B. Service level managementFocuses on setting, agreeing, and managing service level targets and ensuring that services meet agreed performance levels. It does not primarily manage user contact channels.

C. Incident managementFocuses on restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible after incidents occur. It uses information gathered by the service desk but does not itself guarantee multiple channels for users.

D. Change enablementDeals with ensuring that changes are properly evaluated, authorized, and managed. It is not about user-facing communication channels.

Therefore, A. Service desk is correct because it is explicitly responsible for providing and managing the channels through which users report issues and make requests.

References (ITIL 4 Foundation):

ITIL® Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition – Service desk practice (purpose and key activities)

ITIL® Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition – Overview of incident management and relationship with the service desk

The ITIL guiding principle ‘focus on value’ states that everything an organization does should link back, directly or indirectly, to value for itself, its customers, and other stakeholders1. A good way to apply this principle is to understand why services are used by service consumers, what outcomes they enable, and how they contribute to value creation2. This helps to align the service provider’s activities and resources with the needs and preferences of the service consumers3. References: ITIL Foundation - ITIL 4 Edition, page 6; ITIL® 4 – A Pocket Guide, page 24; ITIL® 4 Practice Guide: Focus on Value, page 9.

This is one of the most important questions for continual improvement. This question helps to define measurable targets for the IT service provider that will help to reach the vision of the company in the long-term. At this stage, we look at the identified key performance indicators from the previous step and determine what values we want to target for each of these indicators. This decision must be made with the business’s vision in mind, but also with a sense of what is practically possible.

https://blog.masterofproject.com/continual-improvement-model/

The incident management practice aims to minimize the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible1. A complex or major incident is an incident that has a significant impact or urgency for the business and requires a high level of coordination and resources to resolve2. This may require a temporary team to work together, such as a major incident team or a swarming team3. References: ITIL Foundation - ITIL 4 Edition, page 14; ITIL® 4 – A Pocket Guide, page 32; ITIL® 4 Practice Guide: Incident Management, page 8.

The change enablement practice maximizes the number of successful service and product changes by ensuring that risks have been properly assessed, authorized, and managed within a schedule1. Change authorization is the activity of verifying that a proposed change is desirable, viable, and achievable before committing to its implementation2. The change type (standard, normal, or emergency) and model (a predefined approach for handling a specific type of change) is the basis for assigning the change authority (the role that can authorize a change)2. The other statements are incorrect because:

A standard change is a low-risk, pre-authorized change that follows an agreed procedure and does not require authorization at the point of implementation2.

An emergency change is a high-priority change that must be implemented as soon as possible to resolve an incident or implement a security patch2. An emergency change must be authorized by an emergency change authority (ECA), which is usually a subset of the normal change authority (CAB)2.

Ensuring that changes are authorized before their deployment is done by the change enabler (the role that coordinates all aspects of a change)2. References: ITIL Foundation - ITIL 4 Edition, page 16; ITIL® 4 – A Pocket Guide, page 39; ITIL® 4 Practice Guide: Change Enablement, page 7.

In ITIL 4, the continual improvement practice uses a continual improvement register (CIR) as a key tool to record, prioritize, track, and manage improvement opportunities.

The CIR is used to:

Log improvement ideas from any source

Track these ideas from initial identification through assessment, prioritization, and implementation

Provide visibility of the status and progress of each improvement

Support decision-making about which improvements to pursue and when

This matches option C: “Used to track and manage improvement ideas from identification through to final action.”

Why the other options are incorrect:

A. Used to help plan changes, assist in communication, avoid conflicts, and assign resourcesThis describes aspects of change enablement and change schedule / change calendar, not the continual improvement register.

B. Used to select the right method, model or technique for identifying improvementsMethods and models (such as SWOT, balanced scorecard, etc.) support improvement activities, but the CIR is not about choosing methods; it is about recording and managing improvement opportunities.

D. Used to provide a formal description of one or more services, designed to address the needs of a target consumer groupThis describes a service catalogue entry or service offering, not a continual improvement register.

So, the CIR is specifically a tracking and management tool for improvement ideas, making C the correct answer.

References (Aligned with ITIL 4 Foundation concepts)

ITIL 4 Foundation: Continual improvement practice – use of a continual improvement register to log and manage improvements across their lifecycle

ITIL 4 Foundation: Service management practices overview – distinction between change enablement, service catalogue management, and continual improvement

A help desk is considered to be focused on break-fix (what ITIL calls incident management), whereas a service desk is there to assist with not only break-fix but also with service requests (requests for new services) and requests for information (such as “how do I do X?”).

https://www.atlassian.com/itsm/service-request-management/help-desk-vs-service-desk-vs-itsm#:~:text=A%20help%20desk%20is%20considered,I%20do%20X%3F%E2%80%9D).

Service desks provide a variety of channels for access including:

Phone calls, which can include specialized technology, such as interactive voice response (IVR), conference calls, voice recognition, and others.

Service portals and mobile applications, supported by service and request catalogues, and knowledge bases.

Chat, through live chat and chatbots.

Email for logging and updating, and for follow-up surveys and confirmations.

Walk-in service desk (which are becoming more prevalent in some sectors, such as higher education, where there are high peaks of activity that demand physical presence).,

Text and social media messaging, which are useful for notifications in case of major incidents and for contacting specific stakeholder groups, but can also be used to allow users to request support.

Public and corporate social media and discussion forums for contacting the service provider and for peer-to-peer support.

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itil-service-desk/

To protect the information needed by the organization to conduct its business. This includes understanding and managing risks to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information, as well as other aspects of information security such as authentication and non-repudiation.

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/itil-management-practices/