ITIL4F Key Concepts of IT Service Management Practice Question
A company is experiencing frequent service outages due to unauthorized changes to the production environment. Which ITIL practice would be most effective in preventing these issues?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse incident management (fixing outages) with change enablement (preventing outages by controlling changes), leading them to select incident management because they focus on the symptom (outages) rather than the root cause (unauthorized changes).
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Change enablement
Change enablement is the ITIL practice that ensures all changes to the production environment are properly assessed, authorized, and controlled before implementation. By enforcing a standardized change management process—including change requests, approvals, and review boards—this practice directly prevents unauthorized modifications that cause service outages.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Incident management
Why it's wrong here
Incident management focuses on minimizing the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service operation as quickly as possible. Its primary objective is reactive, addressing unplanned interruptions or reductions in service quality. While crucial for service restoration, it does not proactively control or prevent unauthorized changes that could cause such outages in the first place, making it unsuitable for the stated problem of preventing outages due to unauthorized changes.
- ✓
Change enablement
Why this is correct
Change enablement is the practice of ensuring that all changes to services, products, and organizational components are assessed, authorized, and implemented in a controlled manner. Its purpose is to maximize the number of successful service and product changes by reducing the risk of negative impact, including service outages caused by unauthorized or poorly managed modifications. By establishing clear procedures for change requests, evaluation, approval, and deployment, it directly addresses the prevention of issues stemming from uncontrolled alterations.
- ✗
Problem management
Why it's wrong here
Problem management aims to reduce the likelihood and impact of incidents by identifying and resolving the root causes of actual and potential incidents. While it might identify that unauthorized changes are a root cause of frequent outages, its role is to analyze and recommend solutions, not to directly govern or control the implementation of changes themselves. It provides insights that inform change enablement, but does not execute the change control function.
- ✗
Service desk
Why it's wrong here
The service desk serves as the single point of contact between the service provider and its users, primarily handling incident resolution, service requests, and communication. Its focus is on user support and facilitating service access, not on the governance or control of infrastructure and service changes. While a service desk might log change requests, it does not possess the authority or processes to assess, authorize, or prevent unauthorized changes from being implemented.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This ITIL4F practice question is part of Courseiva's free PeopleCert certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the ITIL4F exam.