ITIL Practices
What this domain tests
The exam tests the purpose and key terms of selected ITIL practices and how they integrate. Practices are organizational capabilities, grouped as general management, service management, and technical management.
Core distinctions
- Incident management restores normal service quickly and minimizes impact. An incident is an unplanned interruption or reduction in service quality.
- Problem management reduces the likelihood and impact of incidents by managing causes. A problem is a cause or potential cause of incidents; a known error is a problem with a documented root cause and workaround.
- Service request management handles user-initiated, pre-agreed requests that are part of normal service delivery.
- Change enablement maximizes successful changes by assessing risk and authorizing change. Release management makes a version available for use; deployment management moves components into the live environment.
- Service level management sets business-based targets and measures them; SLAs are with customers, OLAs are internal, and underpinning contracts are with suppliers.
- Service desk is the single point of contact for users. IT asset management manages assets for financial, inventory, and contractual value; service configuration management manages configuration items and their relationships.
- Monitoring and event management observes services and records state changes. Information security management protects confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Supplier and relationship management manage external and stakeholder links.
Worked example
Repeated payment failures occur. Incident management restores payment service and records a workaround. Problem management finds the root cause and records a known error. Change enablement authorizes the fix; deployment moves it into live; release makes the new version available. Service level management reports against payment availability targets. Continual improvement updates the improvement register. Reasoning: each practice has a distinct purpose; confusing them produces wrong actions, such as treating a root-cause investigation as an incident.
Traps
Equating incident with problem; treating a service request as an incident; treating change as release or deployment; using CMDB as an asset inventory; confusing SLA with OLA; reducing information security to antivirus; assuming monitoring resolves incidents.