ITIL Intermediate Module – Service Offerings and Agreements Exam (ITIL-SOA) - PCERT Exam Questions

Scenario A commercial IT services company has been successful for many years. Its key strategic differentiator has been the provision of new services to meet customers’ needs in very short lead times. Recently profits have dipped, forcing senior management to take a look at the lifecycle costs of providing the IT services to their external customers. The organization has had a service catalogue containing customer and supporting views for some time. It is an essential source of information about the IT services and is used by both the business relationship managers and the IT services teams. Services are designed internally but often transitioned and operated in partnership with other suppliers.

For each service, the service catalogue currently contains:

• A description of the service

• Summary of the service level targets

• The level of support and support details

• Details of the supporting services and components

• Details of services obtained from suppliers

When sales leads are obtained from potential new customers, the requirements are compared with services in the service catalogue and, if no matching service can be found, a project is set up to quickly develop a new service. In the past this has been justified as meeting the needs of the customers, and full business cases were not developed. A senior service manager has suggested introducing a service portfolio management process and needs to get the support of the IT management team. The management team wishes to know what extra information would be included in a service portfolio over and above what is already in the
service catalogue and what value it would be to them.
The company is looking to restrict investment in new resources. Therefore, only a few projects can be authorized in the next budget cycle.

Refer to the Scenario.

Which one of the following sets of statements BEST describes the elements that a service portfolio contains in addition to the elements in a service catalogue, and describes the additional value service portfolio management would bring to the IT services company in resolving their current issues?

Scenario An IT security company provides secure data services to many large financial organizations in several countries. The company has an administrative headquarters in its home country and a data centre in each country of operation. Each data centre obtains support for services from third-party contracts provided by a number of suppliers. All supporting services are scoped and documented, and are aligned to the corporate strategy and the regulations in force in each country. The security services company maintains and regularly reviews a preferred supplier list from which suppliers are selected as required. A service desk function is provided by one of the suppliers. Over the last 10 years, a strong relationship has been built up with the supplier based on the high-quality, consistent service they have provided. The nature of the financial business requires the service desk contract to contain severe penalty clauses that can be enforced if the agreed service levels are not maintained, although these have never been required. A number of complaints have been received from a new banking customer highlighting that, over the previous three months, the level of service provided by the service desk in the management and handling of incidents has been inconsistent, and many incidents have not been resolved in line with agreed targets. The IT security company has a service level manager who has performed the role for many years. Recently, a new supplier management process was implemented and a supplier manager appointed. Some confusion has arisen over how, and by whom, the recent complaints should be dealt with.

Refer to the Scenario. You have been asked to resolve the confusion over the service level manager and supplier manager roles. Which one of the following options BEST represents the correct division of responsibilities and will also address the current complaints regarding the service desk supplier?

A major international company owns shopping malls in many countries. They are responsible for the security, safety and comfort of shoppers visiting the stores in the mall and the facilities management of the locations. The company relies on IT services provided by its IT division. The IT division consists of a corporate IT department at the company's headquarters and a local IT team at each mall. The IT division obtains IT services and products from over 100 different suppliers globally. The management of suppliers within the IT division is currently performed by the local IT teams in each country, often by the most appropriate technical manager. This has resulted in inconsistent processes and levels of service across the countries. The management team realizes that this is an ineffective use of IT resources and will have an impact on the future growth of the company. They are currently reviewing the situation and wish to develop supplier management processes that are more closely aligned to ITIL practices. The management team recently conducted a survey of all of the local IT teams within the different countries to collect details about the number and type of contracts and suppliers. The IT division has developed and implemented many other ITIL processes over the last two years,

which has led to significant improvements. The management team would like to build on this success and develop and implement a supplier management process. You have recently joined the corporate IT department and have been given the results of the survey carried out by the management team.

Refer to Scenario

Which one of the following options is the BEST sequence of activities to adopt in order to implement a supplier management process and to bring the current situation under control?

Scenario An internet banking organization plans to expand operations outside of its current market. Whilst the exact details have yet to be established, it is clear that the IT organization must expand its service offerings within the current portfolio in order to support this growth. It is equally apparent that external customer needs for banking will vary from market to market and that consequently this will require development of completely new service offerings. You are the head of service within the IT organization. You helped the organization adopt the ITIL framework some years ago and now have most processes in place. Service owners are allocated for the main IT services. Mature service portfolio, service catalogue and service level management processes are in place. The expansion requires ownership of a business relationship management process and you are considering the role profile for this post.

Refer to the Scenario.

Which one of the following options provides the BEST overview of the business relationship manager’s (BRM) responsibilities which will be key to support the expansion?

Scenario A clothing manufacturer has made a decision to supplement factory-based retail outlets by opening a series of stores at out-of-town shopping malls. The internal IT organization provides support to many mission-critical business systems for both the manufacturing and retail operations. It must increase its portfolio of services and service options to meet the planned new expansion. Typically, the business is subject to seasonal patterns of demand,

which recently have begun to exceed the capability of some of the IT services. This has led to periods of poor performance of some of the critical systems and therefore to degraded service quality. In periods of minimal demand, there is a surplus of capacity and performance is optimal. There is concern that the additional business demand from the new stores will exacerbate these
service performance issues.
The board of directors, made up of representatives from each business unit, has asked for a review of the business supply and demand issues currently being faced by the IT organization. Many service management processes have been implemented including service portfolio management and capacity management. However, IT does not have a demand management process. Additionally, performance levels on many of the supporting services have remained unchanged for the past 3 years, even though some may now be less relevant to the overall performance of the critical services.

Refer to the Scenario. The review of the supply and demand issues concluded that the implementation of a demand management process could help the IT organization address the issues. Which one of the following options provides the BEST solution to both the problems currently being faced and those related to the proposed expansion?