A service is a means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve, without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks.

Utility is the functionality offered by a product or service to meet a particular need.

Change enablement is the practice of ensuring that risks are properly assessed, authorizing changes to proceed, and managing a change schedule in order to maximize the number of successful IT changes.

An event is any change of state that has significance for the management of a service or other configuration item.

Information security management is the practice of protecting an organization by understanding and managing risks to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information.

Monitoring and event management is the practice of systematically observing services and service components and recording and reporting selected changes of state identified as events.

Incident management is the practice of minimizing the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible.

Service configuration management is the practice of ensuring that accurate and reliable information about the configuration of services, and the configuration items that support them, is available when and where needed.

The service desk is the practice of capturing demand for incident resolution and service requests.

A service offering is a description of one or more services, designed to address the needs of a target consumer group (which may include goods, access to resources, and service actions). In the case of this service offering, Dion Training is providing students with everything they need to study for the certification exam (videos, practice exams, and a study guide), but they are not providing the students with the actual exam voucher to take the exam. The service provider may offer a different package or bundle that provides the voucher as well.

An output is a tangible or intangible deliverable of an activity. For example, a ‘Profit and Loss statement’ being produced might be an output of an accounting program.

An organization is a person or a group of people that has its own functions with responsibilities, authorities, and relationships to achieve its objectives. An organization can be an entire company, a department within a company, or even just a small group of people focused around a singular set of objectives.

A guiding principle is defined as a recommendation that can guide an organization in all circumstances and will guide organizations when adopting service management. They are not described as prescriptive or mandatory.

The customer experience (CX) is an important element of value. The customer experience must be actively managed. The service provider must know how service consumers use each service and understand the entirety of the interactions that a customer has with an organization and its products to fully understand the customer experience. This is mainly identified and explored through a ‘focus on value’.

Based on the scenario given, this best describes the guiding principle of ‘start where you are’ because the current state is being investigated and observed directly to ensure it is fully understood before attempting to build a new service. The team manager is attempting to leverage the pre-existing processes and procedures before creating new ones from scratch.

This is an example of the guiding principle of ‘progress iteratively with feedback’. Since the curriculum was created (v1.0), and then changed based on student experience and feedback, the curriculum was updated and revised to the next version (v1.1). At Dion Training, we are always improving our courses based on our students’ reviews and feedback to continually improve the courses we teach.

The guiding principle of ‘collaborate and promote visibility’ relies on personnel working across boundaries to produce results that have greater buy-in, more relevance to objectives, and an increased likelihood of success. In the scenario, you formed a team from across the organization’s various departments in an effort to collaborate and increase visibility into the new service’s design.

Under the ‘think and work holistically’ guiding principle, it is important to understand that no service, practice, process, department, or supplier works independently. Instead, each person needs to think about the service from an end-to-end perspective in order to ensure maximum compatibility and efficiency. Out of the options provided, the best one to choose for supporting the principle of ‘think and work holistically’ is for John to meet with Sally to determine how she plans to conduct the digital product fulfillment. This will allow him to ensure the portion of the system he is responsible for can work properly with other portions of the service.

The ‘organization and people’ dimension of a service covers roles and responsibilities, formal organizational structures, culture, and required staffing and competencies, all of which are related to the creation, delivery, and improvement of a service.

The ‘partners and suppliers’ dimension focuses on the organization’s relationships with other organizations that are involved in the design, development, deployment, delivery, support, and/or continual improvement of services. This also incorporates contracts and other agreements between the organization and its partners or suppliers.

The components of the service value system are ‘guiding principles’, ‘governance’, ‘service value chain’, ‘practices’, and ‘continual improvement’.

The service value chain is the central element of the service value system and is an operating model outlining the key activities required to respond to demand and facilitate value realization through the creation and management of products and services.

The outputs of the ‘plan’ value chain activity include portfolio decisions for design and transition. The ‘plan’ value chain activity is used to create a shared understanding of the vision, current status, and improvement direction for all four dimensions and all products and services across the organization.

According to the step called ‘what is the vision’, each improvement initiative should support the organization’s goals and objectives.

The first step of the continual improvement model is called ‘what is the vision’. During this step, it is important to identify the high-level direction of the initiative, but it is not important to define metrics, the current process, or the detailed steps of how to achieve your objective yet. Those all come in the later steps of the model.

Bridgett is in the ‘where do we want to be’ step of the continual improvement model. This step is focused on defining the goal for the organization based on the vision and putting into terms what can be measured and quantified (such as Critical Success Factors and Key Performance Indicators).

Normal changes are changes which need to be scheduled, assessed, and authorized following a standard process. These changes are not considered routine (like a standard change). They are also not considered urgent and don’t need to be implemented as soon as possible to recover from an incident (like an emergency change).

An emergency change is change that must be implemented as soon as possible to resolve an incident or security issue. (Note: Routine is not a type of change in ITIL 4.)

A change schedule is used to help plan changes, assist in communication, avoid conflicts, and assign resources. By publishing the change schedule, everyone in the organization can know when a change is occurring, what people or components will be affected by the change, and when downtime or outages may occur. Change schedules are not used to develop features for a service.

By classifying incidents based on an agreed classification scheme, you can ensure that incidents with the highest business impact are resolved first. The other choices are considered good things to do within your organization, but incident classification directly results in faster resolution for incidents classified as ‘high priority’.

Every incident should be logged and managed to ensure that it is resolved in a time that meets the expectations of the customer and user.

Problem management involves three distinct phases: problem identification, problem control, and error control.

A workaround is a solution that reduces or eliminates the impact of an incident or problem for which a full resolution is not yet available. Some workarounds reduce the likelihood of incidents.

This is the ‘improve’ activity. Improve includes the analysis of data to identify opportunities to provide new service request options.

Service requests and their fulfillment should be standardized and automated to the greatest degree possible. By using standardization, we can decrease the consumer’s wait time for a resolution since every service desk analyst will handle the request the same way. This allows efficiencies of scale to be achieved.

The purpose of the service desk practice is to capture demand for incident resolution and service requests. It should also be the entry point and single point of contact for the service provider with all of its users.

A good service desk should have a practical understanding of the wider organization, the business processes, and the users.

Service level agreements are used to measure the performance of services from a customer’s point of view. They may measure availability and capability, but only from the customer’s point of view.

The ‘plan’ activity in the service level management practice supports planning of the product and service portfolio and service offerings with information about the actual service performance and trends.

They should relate to defined outcomes and not simply operational metrics. This can be achieved with balanced ‘bundles’ of metrics.

Utility is the functionality offered by a product or service to meet a particular need.

A customer is a person who defines the requirements for a service and takes responsibility for the outcomes of service consumption.

An IT asset is any valuable component that can contribute to the delivery of an IT product or service.

A configuration item is any component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT service.

Relationship management is the practice of establishing and nurturing links between an organization and its stakeholders at strategic and tactical levels.

Problem management is the practice of reducing the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying actual and potential causes of incidents, and managing workarounds and known errors.

Incident management is the practice of minimizing the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible.

Continual improvement is the practice of aligning an organization’s practices and services with changing business needs through the ongoing identification and improvement of all elements involved in the effective management of products and services.

Service level management is the practice of setting clear business-based targets for service performance so that the delivery of a service can be properly assessed, monitored, and managed against these targets.

Service relationship management refers to the joint activities performed by a service provider and a service consumer to ensure continual value co-creation based on agreed and available service offerings. In this example, Google is acting as the service provider and Dion Training is acting as the service consumer for the email services. This enables the co-creation of value to Dion Training and aids in their ability to provide email support to their students.

Value is the perceived benefits, usefulness, and importance of something.

Risk is a possible event that could cause harm or loss, or make it more difficult to achieve objectives. Risk can also be defined as uncertainty of outcome and can be used in the context of measuring the probability of positive outcomes, as well as negative outcomes.

A guiding principle is defined as a recommendation that can guide an organization in all circumstances and will guide organizations when adopting service management. They are not described as prescriptive or mandatory.

In order to understand the consumer’s perspective of value, it is important that the service provider understand why the consumer uses the service, what the services help them to do, and how the services help them achieve their own goals. The guiding principle that most closely aligns to your team’s task is ‘focus on value’. ‘Focus on value’ ensures that everything the organization does should link back, directly or indirectly, to value for itself, its customers, and other stakeholders.

Based on the scenario given, this best describes the guiding principle of ‘start where you are’ because the current state is being investigated and observed directly to ensure it is fully understood before attempting to build a new service. The team manager is attempting to leverage the pre-existing processes and procedures before creating new ones from scratch. He is not attempting to optimize the current service, but simply desires to understand it so they can identify any issues that should be avoided and any good components of the service that may be reused in the new service.

The guiding principle of ‘collaborate and promote visibility’ is focused on involving the right people in the correct roles in order to get additional buy-in for the project and increase the likelihood of long-term success.

When analyzing a practice, process, service, metric, or other improvement targets, always ask whether it contributes to value creation. If value is not being created, then eliminate the unnecessary steps to simplify the process.

The guiding principle of ‘optimize and automate’ relies heavily on automation. Automation is the use of technology to perform a step or series of steps correctly and consistently with limited or no human involvement.

The ‘organization and people’ dimension of a service covers roles and responsibilities, formal organizational structures, culture, and required staffing and competencies, all of which are related to the creation, delivery, and improvement of a service.

The ‘information and technology’ dimension focuses on the information and knowledge necessary for the management of services, as well as the technologies required.