ITIL4F ITIL Management Practices Practice Question
Which ITIL practice is responsible for negotiating and agreeing on service level targets?
⚠ Common exam trap
ITIL4F often tests the confusion between Service Level Management and practices like Availability or Capacity Management — candidates must remember that SLM owns the negotiation and agreement of targets, while other practices provide the technical inputs to meet those targets.
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
✓
Service Level Management
Service Level Management is the ITIL practice responsible for negotiating, agreeing, and managing service level targets with customers. It defines, documents, and monitors Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and ensures that services are delivered according to agreed-upon expectations. This practice is the direct owner of the SLA lifecycle, from negotiation through review.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Supplier Management
Why it's wrong here
Supplier Management focuses on establishing and maintaining effective relationships with third-party providers and their contracts. While it involves negotiating terms and conditions with suppliers for products and services, its primary responsibility is to ensure these external entities deliver in accordance with their contractual obligations to support the organization's own service delivery, rather than directly negotiating customer-facing service levels.
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Capacity and Performance Management
Why it's wrong here
Capacity and Performance Management is primarily concerned with ensuring that IT services and the underlying infrastructure can meet current and future demand in a cost-effective manner. This practice involves monitoring resource utilization, analyzing performance trends, and planning for necessary adjustments or upgrades to prevent bottlenecks, but it does not directly negotiate the service level targets with customers.
- ✗
Availability Management
Why it's wrong here
Availability Management focuses on ensuring that services and components are available to perform their agreed function when required, for the agreed period. This involves planning, designing, implementing, and monitoring the reliability, maintainability, and serviceability of IT infrastructure and services to meet agreed availability targets, but the negotiation and formal agreement of these targets with customers falls outside its direct scope.
- ✓
Service Level Management
Why this is correct
Service Level Management is the dedicated practice responsible for defining, negotiating, and agreeing upon service level targets with customers. It establishes Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that document these agreed expectations, then monitors and reports on the actual performance of services against these targets, ensuring a clear understanding and alignment between service providers and consumers.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official PeopleCert exam blueprint
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.