IT Service Management and Professional Practices
Core concepts
Understand core ITIL-style concepts: incidents (unplanned interruptions), service requests (standard user needs), problems (root cause of recurring incidents), and changes (modifications under control). Know the service desk role, priority as impact times urgency, SLA targets, and the difference between incident and problem management. Understand change management with approval and rollback, configuration management (CMDB), knowledge management, and continual improvement. Recognize professional practices: confidentiality, documentation, escalation, and ethical handling of data.
Traps in questions
A common trap is confusing incident with problem: restoring service quickly is incident management; finding the root cause is problem management. Another is treating every request as an incident - password resets and access requests are usually service requests. Questions may misdefine priority; it derives from impact and urgency, not from who is complaining. Also, emergency changes still require documentation, even if approval is retrospective.
Worked example / rule of thumb
Several users report the same recurring outage weekly. Rule of thumb: fix service first, then investigate root cause. Resolve the immediate incident to restore service, then open a problem record to find and eliminate the underlying cause. This incident-then-problem sequence answers many process questions.
Exam focus
Expect classification of tickets, priority derivation, change approval, SLA meaning, and ethical or documentation requirements.