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?
Change enablement controls the lifecycle of all changes, enabling beneficial changes with minimal disruption.
Why this answer
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.
Exam trap
The trap here is that 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).
How to eliminate wrong answers
Option A is wrong because incident management focuses on restoring normal service operation after an outage has occurred, not on preventing unauthorized changes from happening in the first place. Option C is wrong because problem management aims to identify and eliminate the root causes of incidents, but it does not control or authorize changes to the production environment. Option D is wrong because the service desk acts as the single point of contact for users reporting issues, not as a governance mechanism for approving or rejecting changes.