IT Service Management and Operations Processes
Domain 8 tests whether you can place a situation into the correct process: incident, problem, change or configuration. The common failure is mixing incident speed with problem root-cause work.
Core processes
Incident management restores normal service as quickly as possible, with workarounds allowed; it records, classifies, prioritises, escalates and closes. Priority is derived from impact (users and business functions affected) and urgency (how fast the business needs it). A major incident gets a dedicated coordinator and structured communication. Problem management finds and removes the root cause; a known error is a diagnosed root cause with a documented workaround. Change management controls modification: request for change, risk and impact assessment, approval by the change advisory board, standard or normal or emergency classification, scheduled window, rollback plan, and post-implementation review. Configuration management maintains the CMDB and the relationships between configuration items, verified by audit. The service desk is the single point of contact and owns first-line resolution and ticket quality.
Service levels
An SLA is with the customer, an OLA is internal between teams, and an underpinning contract is with a supplier. Distinguish response time from resolution time, and state availability as agreed service hours minus downtime, divided by agreed service hours.
Worked example
Two hundred users cannot reach the mail server. Impact is high and urgency is high, so it is a P1 incident: the service desk logs it, a major-incident coordinator is assigned, and mail is restored via a workaround within the SLA. The same failure recurs every Monday. Because the cause is still unknown, a problem record is opened; investigation finds runaway mailbox store growth. Removing the cause needs a configuration change, so an RFC goes to the CAB, is deployed in a maintenance window, verified, and the CMDB entry for the mail server is updated with the new storage and maintenance job.
Traps
- Closing an incident as though it were a problem record, so root cause is never found.
- Emergency changes applied without any retrospective documentation.
- Equating priority with severity, or with the seniority of the caller.
- Forgetting to update the CMDB after a change, so the next diagnosis starts from wrong data.
- Resolving tickets without a recorded description and resolution note.