ITIL Intermediate Capability Stream: RELEASE CONTROL AND VALIDATION (RCV) CERTIFICATE SCENARIO BOOKLET Scenario One A global company develops its own applications to support the business. The service transition function is responsible for testing and deploying releases. There are many releases of different types each week; these are classified as major, minor and emergency. The company s objectives of service management are to provide quality support and good value for IT-enabled business services, and to maintain high stakeholder satisfaction. However, over the last twelve months, the quality of the releases has deteriorated and total costs of IT services have increased. Recent stakeholder satisfaction surveys have identified the following issues: Testing often completes later than planned Deployment of releases into production is often late Poor stakeholder satisfaction with the service transition function Cost overruns for the testing of several releases Each release introduces a high number of errors into production Service levels are adversely affected for some time after each deployment. You are the process owner for service validation and testing and have recently implemented improved procedures for recording errors identified during testing. You now want to introduce appropriate service transition metrics for quality, time, cost, and stakeholder feedback in order to identify further areas for improvement. A tool which is used to support service management has the capability to track several possible key performance indicators (KPIs) but, due to constraints, it can only report on five of them. The possible KPIs are: 1. Increase in the number of errors identified during testing 2. Reduction in the time to test each release 3. Reduction in the number of incidents in the live environment that are attributable to each release, classified by impact / disruption 4. Reduction in the number of days following each deployment before service levels are restored 5. Reduction in the number and percentage of problems and known errors identified during testing a release that is deployed to service operation 6. Reduction in the cost of managing the test environment and conducting acceptance testing 7. Increase in the ROI of testing 8. Increase in stakeholder satisfaction with the testing process. The Swirl logo is a trade mark of the Cabinet Office ITIL is a registered trade mark of the Cabinet Office Page 1 of 1
Scenario Two The IT organization manages the main company website where recently there have been significant increases in usability issues, performance-related incidents and major outages. The company is implementing ITIL and a new, risk-based approach for service validation and testing. The risk management methodology uses the following risk profile and classifications: Risk Profile table Likelihood (probability) High Acceptable Unacceptable Unacceptable Medium Acceptable Acceptable Unacceptable Low Acceptable Acceptable Acceptable Low Medium High Im pact (effect) A major release for the company website - WR2 - is due to be deployed to the main website next week. You are responsible for conducting the evaluation for the WR2 release and reporting this back to change management. Your evaluation meeting for the WR2 release has identified the following findings and deviations from the service design baseline: a) A security audit was missed and the consequential risk of a security breach has been assessed as low probability and medium impact. b) Given the current performance and availability issues on the main website, the IT operations manager assessed that the risk of downtime will increase to medium likelihood and high impact when WR2 is deployed. c) The project has a budget for deploying WR2 but not for early life support. There is another planned release (WR3) next quarter that might have some leftover budget. d) The return on investment differs from the baseline because the estimated total cost of service provision increased by 20%. e) The planned capacity and performance monitoring capability on the main company website is not ready. f) Verification and testing is not complete: 20% of the tests are incomplete due to lack of manpower. Scenario Three The IT organization of a large bank has to account for all commercial software licences. Recently, external audits revealed that major non-conformances had been recorded for software products A and B. Licences for these products are managed in two different ways: Product A: 6,000 licences, one for each PC user in test and production environments Product B: Corporate licence for software installed in production for up to 18,000 users The IT organization is implementing service management using ITIL practices. You are the chief information officer (CIO) and you do not want to encounter any surprises in the next external audit. You want all commercial software licence information held in the configuration management system (CMS) to be at least 98% accurate within six months. Page 2 of 2
You understand that the accuracy of the CMS relies on the IT organization creating and following an effective service asset and configuration management (SACM) process. You have asked your SACM manager to start the SACM planning. As the first step, your SACM manager has defined the scope and activities of the SACM process for producing and maintaining an accurate CMS, as follows: Configuration Identification ensures that information about all configuration items (CIs) across our service portfolio is captured. This helps identify all software licences installed within our production environment. Configuration control ensures that any changes to CIs are authorized and implemented in a controlled manner. Status accounting and reporting generates lists of IT assets, their physical locations and descriptions. This helps us keep track of the changes required for software licence control. Configuration audit verifies the software licences against the physical installation of the CI. It leads to discovery of non-conformances and development of corrective actions. Scenario Four A global air cargo service company is planning to upgrade its service desk system (SDS) for all users located in North America and Europe. Prior to installing the new SDS module, a user s PC must meet a minimum baseline configuration. There are 4800 users, including 200 service desk agents, in North America; all of their PCs meet the prerequisites. There are 1400 users in Europe but only 50% of their PCs meet the prerequisites. There are three ways that the SDS module can be installed: 1. Company staff can pull (download) the new SDS module from an intranet website but the prerequisites must first be manually installed. 2. If the prerequisites have been met, a software distribution tool can be used to push (install) the SDS module to PCs via the internal network. There is a fixed licence charge each time the tool is used for performing a push, unless the tool discovers that the module has already been installed. 3. There are two onsite engineers in Europe who can perform manual upgrades; each engineer can complete the installation of the SDS module and its prerequisites for up to 120 PCs per month. Manual upgrade is the most expensive way to deploy the upgrade, followed by push and then pull. To balance the benefits and cost of the upgrade, the company has decided to fully deploy the SDS upgrade to all users across North America and Europe within three months. Page 3 of 3
Scenario Five The following diagram shows the organization structure for a publishing company: Managing Director Director of Sales and Operations Director of Finance and IT Sales and Marketing Business Operations Head of IT Financial Controller Financial Operations Purchasing IT Operations and Support Payroll Research & Development IT Technicians (4) Accounts Office Warehousing and Distribution Service desk agents (3) Availability and Capacity Change Configuration Development IT developers (6) A change management policy that states All changes must be authorized at the appropriate level has been agreed within the company. The following four requests for change (RFCs) must be evaluated: RFC 1 Start developing a new sales order system using in-house development and with a cost of $250,000. The director of sales and operations has a budget allocated for solutions development. RFC 2 Replace faulty network cards in three PCs in the marketing department as a normal maintenance routine. RFC 3 Deploy the latest planned release of the payroll system purchased from a third party supplier. This will require 2 hours downtime during normal service hours. RFC 4 Deploy a monthly security patch to the operating system on the email server. This can be done overnight with no downtime. Page 4 of 4
Scenario Six You are the head of service for a European company with four different office locations. In the last financial year, 41% of all calls to the service desk were requests to move PCs. Each department has a budget for these moves and all moves costing more than 400 Euros need management approval. There are three different categories for PC relocation service requests designated as, bronze, silver and gold. Each category is determined by the request parameters described in the table below: Category Scope of Move SLA Responsible Price Bronze 5 or fewer PCs in the same office 5 days Internal IT 80 Euros/PC Silver Up to 20 PCs in same country 10 days Supplier 500 Euros/PC Gold More than 20 PCs or different country 15 days Supplier Actual costs per supplier s quotation In order to reduce the number of calls to the service desk and the overall support costs, a web-based request fulfilment process with supporting workflow has recently been piloted. This allows users to raise a PC relocation request from a small menu of options. You have been asked to review the design of this web-based service menu and the process for requesting PC moves. The design must be efficient and easy for the users to follow. Scenario Seven A large bank has initiated a project to outsource the desktop PC support service. The business case, scope, and test criteria for this project have all been agreed and details have been documented in the configuration management system (CMS). These are all now subject to change management. The new service will be piloted in one area of the bank. The IT director is considering adding another service from the same outsource vendor. This new service would involve refurbishing old PCs to extend their useful life. Some of the service management staff working on the outsource project are confused about how change management applies to each of the service lifecycle stages. You are the change manager of the bank. The IT director has asked you to give a presentation to the staff to help clarify the concepts. You have decided to use relevant examples from this project to demonstrate the lifecycle stage where different types of change should be evaluated. You have decided to use the following examples of types of changes for the presentation: Change Reference C1 C2 C3 C4 Description of change Increase the scope of the project to include the PC refurbishment service. The requirement is identified during the service pilot. Start the service pilot. Install a new PC for service readiness testing so that a new set of tests can be conducted. Add a new requirement for service operational readiness tests. The requirement is identified during the service pilot. Page 5 of 5
Scenario Eight A college delivers education to more than 20,000 students through the internet. Many course modules require a high number of changes to be released each month due to rapidly changing educational requirements. Some service management processes were established and documented two years ago. Since then the processes used for release and deployment management and testing have changed, but the process documents have not been updated. Recently there have been frequent service failures following the deployment of various course modules. These incidents have damaged the reputation of IT. The tool used to support service transition is obsolete and is no longer supported. The IT director has decided to replace the tool with a new one. After attending a marketing event the IT director was impressed with a tool called ST4 due to its attractive functions and features that include pre-built workflows for service transition and integrated standard processes with on-line documentation. The company that produced ST4 was established two years ago and ST4 was their first product. Since ST4 is relatively new its adoption rate around the world is low and its support quality is unknown. The IT director wants to improve the quality of releases and rebuild the reputation of IT. You are the head of service transition. Before placing an order for ST4 the IT director has asked for your advice on what should be done. Page 6 of 6