PeopleCert ITIL-SOA ITIL Service Offerings and Agreements Exam Practice Test

Page: 1 / 14
Total 14 questions

Want more questions? Get Premium Access.
()

Question 1

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?

AThe BRM will engage actively with the customers, gain a good insight into their business and plans, and develop a strong working relationship. The BRM will work closely with the customer to understand the value proposition of any new IT services that will be required to support the expansion program. The BRM will liaise with the service level manager and service owners to develop the designs of any new IT services, thereby creating value for both parties. The BRM will ensure customer expectations of new services do not exceed what they have agreed to pay for.

BThe BRM will engage actively with the customers, gain a good insight into their business and plans, and develop a strong working relationship. The BRM will identify the business requirements associated with the expansion program especially concentrating on gaining a clear understanding of business outcomes and business drivers. The BRM will liaise with the service portfolio manager to understand how the business outcomes can be supported by IT services, and, where possible, create new services and service offerings for inclusion in the service catalogue. It is key that the BRM understands how changes to the customer environment in different operating markets might affect the delivery of services.

CThe BRM will engage actively with the customers, gain their trust, and help them develop their business area. This would help both the IT organization and the company become more successful. If the BRM commits time and energy, it should be possible to improve the IT services quickly to meet the needs of the expansion program and therefore achieve the business objectives. The BRM should take responsibility for the services and their development, while the service level manager will take responsibility for customer liaison. The BRM will take ultimate responsibility for ensuring the customer needs are met by the service provider by managing any third parties in the emerging markets.

DThe BRM will have primary responsibility for engaging actively with the customers. They should develop a mutual understanding with the customers and have a good working knowledge of their business. The BRM would also work closely with the service owners to understand the profile and usage of the IT services, to help develop the IT services and to create a new service catalogue for the new markets. The BRM will articulate service provider business requirement to the customer to prevent them asking for services that would involve them paying more for the IT service they receive.

Answer : B

Question 2

Scenario

A retail company has enjoyed significant growth in profit over the past year due to negotiating lower buying costs from its suppliers. The organization wishes to reinvest some of this profit to fund a program of change to optimize the use of IT services. They hope this will support revenue growth in the next financial year whilst maintaining profitability.

The program consists of two main initiatives:

* An expansion of the on-line retailing services to offer more functionality

* Enhancement of the marketing service to allow greater targeting of promotional offers.

There are various options for providing these services that involve use of the current infrastructure or the new virtualization technology, which is slowly being deployed across the organization. The board of directors wishes to conduct a financial review over the next 3 months to compare the cost of providing each service. Projected business revenues will allow the return on investment (ROI) of each option to be calculated. This review will provide an input to the IT organization's service portfolio management process, allowing the various investment options to be considered and an informed decision to be made.

The organization has a good appreciation of its IT costs along with a mature service catalogue and configuration management system (CMS).

Refer to the Scenario.

Which one of the following options would be the BEST approach to providing the information for the financial review of the service options?

AAppoint an IT finance manager to implement budgeting and accounting for IT services.
Create a cost model that takes into account direct and indirect costs, as well as fixed and variable costs.
Use the cost model to calculate the cost of providing the IT services and provide the information to service portfolio management (SPM).

BProduce a summary of current costs, apportioning all costs directly to the appropriate service.
Any investment in virtualization or new infrastructure should be shared equally between the two services.
This creates a baseline for comparison with the anticipated business revenues and ROI that will enable a business case to be developed for each option.

CProduce a summary of current costs, recognizing that the resources are shared across services.
Use service level agreements to understand how the services are used and create a model for the services, ensuring that both current and projected costs are shared appropriately.
These costs can then be compared with the cost of outsourcing the service and with the anticipated business revenue.

DProduce a summary of current costs, recognizing that the resources are shared across services.
The various options for providing the service, including those requiring investment in new infrastructure, can then be costed. Using the projected revenues supplied, a calculation can establish the ROI for each option.
These costs and ROI for each option can then be compared through the service portfolio management process and used as an input to develop a business case for the most advantageous options.

Answer : D

Question 3

Scenario

A flower delivery company introduced ITIL-based service management processes 12 months ago.

One major benefit of the associated service improvement initiatives was that the service availability of the business critical on-line flower ordering IT service increased from 97% to 98.9% over the last quarter. This exceeds the service availability target of 98.5%. Last month, reports were circulated showing the availability improvement.

The service level manager is chairing a service review meeting to review the progress and report upon this achievement. The customer managers acknowledge the improvement but despite the reports of improved service availability, a major service outage occurred during the busiest week of the year when over 25% of the annual business revenue is normally earned. Although IT dealt with the outage satisfactorily, the loss of revenue and credibility in this mission critical, high-visibility trading period are serious concerns. The customer managers are concerned that the reporting does not seem to reflect this or their actual perception of the service.

Agreement is reached at the meeting to address two primary concerns:

1. Service availability targets for the mission critical periods are to be revised.

2. Amended and more representative business reports are to be produced.

Refer to the Scenario.

Which one of the following options will BEST ensure that the primary concerns related to the revision and reporting of targets are addressed?

ADetermine what information each IT team can provide regarding the collection and reporting of component availability. Implement revised mechanisms for the analysis, calculation and reporting of service availability. Ensure that event management is implemented to trigger alerts in response to availability issues. This will allow for reactive measures to be introduced so that, if services fail to meet their availability targets, proper actions can be taken to mitigate future failures.

BMeet with the customer managers to conduct a thorough review of all services and document all revised service level requirements (SLRs), ensuring that business impact and seasonal variations are taken into account. The SLRs should be transformed into a balanced scorecard of service targets with a dashboard for reporting purposes. Mechanisms should be agreed and implemented to collect, analyze and report against the agreed service targets using the change management process. Reports should be circulated to customer managers five working days in advance of service review meetings.

CMeet with the customer managers to review and document their availability requirements, ensuring that business impact and seasonal variations are taken into account. Review the monitoring and measurement mechanisms and ensure that they can measure both component and end-to-end service availability. Agree the revised service availability reporting requirements with the customer. Agree and revise service level agreements and operational level agreements as necessary and implement any changes to the monitoring and reporting mechanisms using the change management process.

DReview the requirements for service availability against the data collection and measurement currently provided by the IT teams. Design availability metrics and controls to report any variances at the monthly service review meetings, as well as how these variances will be addressed in the future. Internal IT staff and a customer manager will attend the service review meetings. All changes have to be agreed in the service review meetings before any actions can be performed, thus forcing the customer to come to the meetings and reach agreement before any improvement work or change can occur.

Answer : C

Question 4

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?

AThe service portfolio should be reviewed and an analysis carried out of each business unit's requirements in order to understand their patterns of business activity (PBA) and corresponding usage of the IT services.
Differentiated service offerings should be developed to match PBA; this will make better use of available IT resources. Supporting service performance targets should be amended to reflect these changes.
Work with business relationship management and capacity management to develop long term plans to meet the extra demand resulting from the company's expansion plans.

BAn analysis should be carried out of each business unit's patterns of business activity (PBA), and appropriate services for each business unit selected from the service catalogue.
In conjunction with the finance department, a revised cost model should be introduced to allow for the fluctuation in usage and costs.
Differential charging should be introduced to address the issues of service quality.

CThe service portfolio should be reviewed and an analysis carried out of each business unit's requirements to understand their current usage of the IT services and where seasonal variations lead to fluctuations in usage.
Discussions should take place with the business units to impose limits within specific time periods for each business unit's usage of IT services.
Work with business relationship management and capacity management to develop long term plans to meet the extra demand resulting from the company's expansion plans.

DThe service portfolio should be reviewed and the business unit's cumulative service usage should be reviewed, monitored and analyzed.
Work with the business to develop short-term measures to manage demand for the IT services, such as delayed or batch processing of retail transactions.
Service levels should be reviewed to take into account changes to supporting service performance targets and, where applicable, agreements should be updated through change management.

Answer : A

Question 5

Scenario

The IT organization of a manufacturing company is carrying out an annual review of its service portfolio. There is limited budget available for the next year and some projects may be delayed or cancelled. The company has control of most of its IT services, however some are mandated by the company's corporate owners.

The following services are under review:

* Service 1: Web ordering service. This is a new service that will enable the company to fulfill its strategy to sell products on-line and increase its customer base by 20%. Only high-level business requirements have been established so far but. if the project goes ahead, the system will be provided by a supplier using standard applications and technology. A business case has been created which shows the ratio of value-to-cost to be much greater than one.

* Service 2: Sales office service. The service has grown from a number of separate applications that have been combined into one suite. The technical solution for each application is similar but some use different versions of the same operating system. The applications themselves provide the required utility and support their business outcomes well. There is some overlap in functionality across the set of applications contained in the service suite.

* Service 3: Finance reporting service. The service is used by the finance department to create statutory reports to fulfill legal obligations. The service is hosted on a legacy system. The cost of supporting the service is increasing gradually and the return obtained from the service is decreasing. Eventually the service will be replaced by the new enterprise resource planning (ERP) service. It is projected that, over the next two years, the ratio of value-to-cost will drop to less than one.

* Service 4: This is a new ERP service that is being implemented across all companies in the corporate group. It will eventually replace many existing services including the finance reporting service. The service has been approved and chartered, and has a current status of "design". A large number of assets have been allocated to this project. As this service is mandated by the corporate owners, no further decision is required.

Refer to Scenario:

As part of the service portfolio management team you have been asked to recommend whether investments should be made in these services in the next year.

Which of the following options is the BEST set of decisions to make for the services?

AService 1 - invest. Charter the service and set up a service design project
Service 2 - replace. Set up project to replace the set of applications with a single application designed to support the business outcomes
Service 3 - retire. Mark the service for retirement and set up a retirement project. This will make best use of resources and ensure that information is migrated to the ERP service.

BService 1 - promote to the service catalogue, project
Service 2 - retain. Keep the service and support
Service 3 - delay decision. It is likely that this project will use assets that will be allocated review. Allocate resources to the transition stage of the it in its current form service will be retired, but not yet. The retirement elsewhere this year. Reconsider at next annual

CService 1 - invest. Charter the service and set up a service design project
Service 2 - rationalize. Set up a project to identify the best way of retaining the support of the business outcomes but eliminating the duplication of functionality and supporting components
Service 3 - delay decision. It is likely that this service will be retired, but not yet. The retirement project will use assets that will be allocated elsewhere this year. Reconsider at next annual review.

DService 1 - promote to the service catalogue. Allocate resources to the transition stage of the project
Service 2 -- re-factor. Set up project to redesign the applications to concentrate on the core functionality of the service
Service 3 - retain. As the service is needed to fulfill legal and statutory compliance it should be retained.

Answer : C

Question 6

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?

A1. Design and develop a supplier management process.
2. Define and agree a supplier policy.
3. Use the results of the survey to categorize each supplier to determine the type of relationship required.
4. Establish and populate a supplier and contract management information system (SCMIS) from the survey feedback.
5. Deploy the process in the corporate IT department as a pilot.
6. Agree which individuals in the corporate IT department and local IT teams are accountable for the management of each contract and supplier.
7. Deploy the process in the remaining countries and conduct a program of awareness and training.

B1. Define and agree a supplier policy.
2. Design and develop a supplier management process.
3. Use the results of the survey to categorize each supplier to determine the type of relationship required.
4. Establish and populate a SCMIS from the survey feedback.
5. Agree which individuals in the corporate IT department and local IT teams are accountable for the management of each supplier.
6. Deploy the process in all countries and conduct a program of awareness and training.
7. Identify where there are duplicate or multiple contracts in place with suppliers and instigate an initiative to review these with the relevant suppliers.

C1. Carry out a further review of the suppliers used by each store in each country.
2. Establish and populate the SCMIS from the results of the exercise.
3. Design and develop a supplier management process.
4. Define and agree a supplier policy.
5. Appoint a supplier manager from the corporate IT department to manage all contracts and all suppliers.
6. Deploy the process in all countries and conduct a program of awareness and training.
7. Renew all contracts to try to obtain better terms and conditions.

D1. Define and agree a supplier policy.
2. Agree which individuals in the corporate IT department and local IT teams are accountable for the management of each supplier.
3. Use the results of the survey to categorize each supplier to determine the type of relationship required.
4. Establish and populate a SCMIS from the survey feedback.
5. Design and develop a supplier management process.
6. Deploy the process in all countries and conduct a program of awareness and training.
7. Work with the service level manager to ensure that all contracts correctly underpin service level agreements.

Answer : D

Question 7

Scenario

An IT services company provides IT services to many customers. The company has grown rapidly over the last three years and has recognized the need to implement service management processes to ensure that they continue to provide services that meet their customer's needs. A service management implementation project was set up a year ago and most processes are now in place including service level management and service catalogue management. In addition a business relationship manager has been allocated.

An opportunity has arisen to engage a new customer, which could lead to a very large contract. Contact has been made with the potential customer and a meeting arranged. This will be the first time that these processes have been used to engage a new customer and the IT service manager wishes to make sure that all concerned are clear of their roles.

Refer to Scenario

Which one of the following options CORRECTLY assigns the responsibilities to the service level manager, service catalogue manager and the business relationship manager?

Responsibilities:

AService catalogue manager - 3, 7, 8, 9
Service level manager - 1, 2, 4
Business relationship manager- 5, 6, 10

BService catalogue manager - 1, 7
Service level manager - 3, 4, 6, 8, 10
Business relationship manager- 2, 5, 9

CService catalogue manager - 1, 8
Service level manager - 2, 3, 5, 9
Business relationship manager- 4, 6, 7, 10

DService catalogue manager - 1, 8, 9
Service level manager - 2, 3, 5, 7, 10
Business relationship manager- 4, 6

Answer : D