CASM study plan

Define agile and lean service management in your own words, distinguishing it from traditional ITIL-style service management on at least four dimensions (customer involvement, planning horizon, change cadence, value focus).

Explain how lean principles (value, value stream, flow, pull, perfection) apply to a service lifecycle, giving one concrete example per principle.

Identify the seven classic wastes (muda) and give a service-sector example of each, then classify three wastes you have personally observed in your own organization.

Construct a current-state value stream map for one real service request path, capturing process steps, queues, handoffs, and lead time from request to fulfillment.

Calculate process cycle efficiency for the map you built, and annotate the two largest delay contributors.

Compare Scrum and Kanban on roles, cadence, work-in-progress limits, and change tolerance, and state which fits a continuous-flow service team and why.

Explain the six core Kanban practices and the meaning of explicit policies, then draft three policies for a service team you know.

Design a Kanban board for an operational service team with at least five columns, WIP limits per column, and a defined pull criterion between each pair of columns.

Apply Little's Law to a sample dataset to predict average lead time from WIP and throughput, and show the arithmetic.

Analyze a cumulative flow diagram and identify where WIP is accumulating and what that implies for delivery predictability.

Produce a future-state value stream map that reduces the two bottlenecks identified in week 1, with target lead time and expected improvement quantified.

Describe how service design differs when requirements are discovered iteratively rather than specified up front, and name the risks this introduces for service continuity.

Write three user stories for a service capability using the role-goal-benefit format, each with at least three acceptance criteria in Given-When-Then form.

Decompose one large service requirement into a story map across user activities and releases, and mark the minimum viable release.

Apply a prioritization technique (for example weighted shortest job first or MoSCoW) to a backlog of ten service items and justify the resulting order.

Map the five aspects of service design (or your framework's equivalent: process, technology, people, partners, information) to the requirements you wrote and flag any gaps.

Explain how agile transition practices (small batch releases, feature flags, canary deployment, blue-green deployment) reduce deployment risk in a service context.

Describe the role of continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines in service transition, and list the quality gates a pipeline should enforce before release.

Define a definition of done for a service release that covers technical, operational, and support readiness criteria.

Explain the DevOps three ways (flow, feedback, continual learning) and give one service-management practice that supports each.

Identify three cultural blockers to Dev and Ops collaboration in a typical enterprise and propose a concrete countermeasure for each.

Draft a release readiness checklist that a service owner could sign off on before a production change.

Assess your own organization's readiness for agile service management using at least five dimensions (leadership support, team skills, tooling, process maturity, risk appetite) and score each.

Identify the stakeholders who must be engaged for a transformation and map their influence and interest.

Describe a phased transformation roadmap with at least three stages and the exit criteria for each stage.

Explain how to build a compelling case for change, including the cost of doing nothing, and outline the first three communication messages.

Anticipate three sources of resistance to the transformation and design a response for each.

Explain Kotter's or a comparable change model and map its steps to your organization's situation.

Explain how governance, risk, and compliance obligations can be satisfied within an agile delivery model without reverting to heavy stage gates.

Describe how to embed controls into the definition of done and the pipeline rather than into separate review meetings.

Distinguish leading from lagging metrics and select three leading indicators that predict service delivery performance.

Design a metrics dashboard for an agile service team with at least six metrics, each with a definition, data source, and target.

Explain how to use flow metrics (lead time, cycle time, throughput, WIP) for forecasting rather than for individual performance evaluation.

Identify three risks of measuring the wrong thing in an agile service context and propose mitigations.

Run a simulated retrospective on the value stream map from week 1 and identify three improvement experiments with owners and success measures.

Design an experiment to improve flow using a WIP limit change or policy change, and state the hypothesis and measurement plan.

Explain how to use the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle for continuous improvement in service management.

Review your metrics dashboard and revise at least two metrics that could incentivize the wrong behavior.

Practice explaining a flow metric to a non-technical stakeholder in two minutes or less.

Consolidate all prior deliverables into a single study portfolio and cross-reference each to the ten exam domains.

Complete a timed practice assessment covering all domains and score it, then analyze errors by domain.

Re-study the two weakest domains based on the practice assessment results.

Explain each of the ten domains in a two-minute verbal summary without notes.

Write a personal exam-day plan covering timing, question strategy, and flag-and-return approach.