ITIL4F Key Concepts of IT Service Management Practice Question
A financial services firm uses a legacy on-premise system for customer account management. The IT team is small, with three administrators responsible for all changes, incidents, and problems. Recently, a change to the system's database schema caused a major outage lasting 4 hours. The post-mortem revealed that the change was not properly tested and was implemented without approval. The IT manager wants to prevent such incidents in the future while maintaining agility. The team often needs to make urgent changes to fix critical bugs. What should the IT manager do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often assume a CAB meeting is always required for all changes, overlooking that ITIL 4 allows standard and emergency change types to maintain agility while ensuring proper testing and approval for high-risk 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
✓
Implement a change enablement practice with standard, normal, and emergency change types
Implementing a change enablement practice with standard, normal, and emergency change types provides a structured yet flexible framework. Standard changes (pre-approved, low-risk) allow routine tasks to proceed quickly, normal changes require approval and testing, and emergency changes can be fast-tracked with post-implementation review. This balances agility with control, directly addressing the root cause (untested, unapproved change) while enabling urgent bug fixes.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Implement a change enablement practice with standard, normal, and emergency change types
Why this is correct
The ITIL 4 change enablement practice categorizes changes into standard, normal, and emergency types to balance speed and risk effectively. Standard changes are pre-authorized and low-risk, allowing for rapid implementation without extensive review. Normal changes follow a defined workflow with appropriate assessment and authorization, suitable for most significant modifications. Emergency changes are expedited with minimal assessment and authorization to restore service quickly, ensuring critical issues are addressed without undue delay while still maintaining essential control. This structured approach ensures appropriate governance for all change scenarios, aligning controls with the potential impact and urgency.
- ✗
Require all changes to go through a change advisory board (CAB) meeting
Why it's wrong here
Requiring all changes, regardless of their urgency or risk profile, to undergo a Change Advisory Board (CAB) meeting introduces significant delays and bureaucratic overhead. This approach is particularly detrimental for emergency changes, which demand immediate action to restore critical services, as waiting for a scheduled CAB meeting would prolong outages and increase business impact. ITIL 4 advocates for a more agile approach, leveraging different change types and appropriate Change Authorities to streamline approvals where appropriate, rather than creating a universal bottleneck that hinders service restoration and agility.
- ✗
Document the incident but take no further action to avoid bureaucracy
Why it's wrong here
Merely documenting an incident without taking further action to address its underlying cause is a critical failure in IT service management. This inaction ensures that the root problem remains unresolved, significantly increasing the likelihood of recurrence and potential future service disruptions. ITIL principles emphasize learning from incidents through problem management to identify and eliminate root causes, thereby preventing their reoccurrence, improving service stability, and delivering continuous value. Passive documentation without subsequent action is an unacceptable strategy that perpetuates service instability.
- ✗
Restrict change implementation to only the senior administrator
Why it's wrong here
Restricting all change implementation to a single senior administrator creates a severe single point of failure, introducing significant operational risks. This approach severely limits the organization's agility and capacity to implement multiple changes concurrently, leading to bottlenecks and delays in service improvement and restoration. Furthermore, it creates an over-reliance on one individual, making the system vulnerable to their absence, burnout, or errors, thereby undermining service resilience, efficiency, and the ability to scale operations effectively.
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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.