ITIL V3 Intermediate Capability Stream:

ITIL V3 Intermediate Capability Stream: RELEASE CONTROL AND VALIDATION (RC&V) CERTIFICATE SCENARIO BOOKLET Scenario One A global commercial IT service provider has three service desks that support internal and external users. Customer satisfaction surveys show that an increasing number of users are unhappy with the service they receive from the service desks, especially with the speed of incident resolution. A pilot project for an IT self-help facility indicates that the speed and cost of incident resolution can be significantly reduced for certain types of users. Last week, an internal audit report raised an issue about the staff s lack of confidence in the accuracy of information in the Configuration Management System (CMS). You are the process owner for Service Knowledge Management and Service Asset and Configuration Management. The objectives of an approved Service Improvement Project (SIP) that you are to deliver are: a) Increase the usage and usability of information in the Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) by users and IT staff b) Improve the accuracy of information in the SKMS and CMS c) Reduce the effort required to resolve incidents by reducing the time for users and IT staff to find information. Scenario Two You are the Configuration Manager for an organization with thirty IT Services. Six-months ago the organization started to implement Configuration Management. So far you have introduced basic processes and have recorded 3000 Configuration Items (CIs). You now want to add the rest of the 165,000 CIs and review the processes. You anticipate a high number of issues because much of the available information is incomplete. To provide support you have approval to recruit a Configuration Analyst and two configuration administrators. The Configuration Analyst will be recruited first. This position has been advertised internally and you have received the following references: Audra Was an internal auditor before starting a new role as a Project Support Officer in the Design Department three years ago. She has a good head for detail and always takes great care and gives complete attention to her work. This has caused issues in the past when key deadlines have been missed because she insisted on following the process. Audra is an experienced mentor, and has given informal training Ben Started here four years ago as an IT Technician. He has worked his way up to be a Desktop Support Engineer with responsibilities across all locations. Because of this, he has good knowledge of many of the IT assets. He has a reputation for being able to resolve complex issues and for being diligent in his work. Ben is confident that he can apply himself to any role. Colin Is an experienced Service Desk Agent with a reputation for innovation and for challenging ways of working. He is good at using initiative to resolve issues instead of following the documented process. He sometimes takes shortcuts in emergencies but these often prove to be a better way to do things. He has a particular responsibility for maintaining the current Service Desk database. Debra Has been a Senior Accounts Clerk for the last twelve years. In her role she has created many new procedures. She has trained people on how to use them. Debra has a reputation for being diligent in her work and enjoys working with detail. For the last five years she has taken part in audits of financial assets. She has very little experience of managing databases. The successful candidate will be given full training on ITIL Release Control and Validation. The Swirl logo is a Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce ITIL is a Registered Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom and other countries Page 1 of 5

Scenario Three ABC company has a Service Desk in each region that handles incidents and service requests. PCS is its primary supplier for personal computing services and on-site service requests. ABC s IT department fulfils other service requests. Due to ABC s expansion, the demand for Service Desk support has increased. A new self-help service for Service Requests is planned to enable users to enter and track their requests online. A prototype of the self-help service was tested and user feedback was good. IT and PCS support groups will need to change their operating procedures for the Request Fulfilment process to include the self help service and procedural changes have not been easy to accomplish in the past. You are the Performance and Risk Evaluation Manager, and you are responsible for the evaluation of the Service Design phase for the self-help service to ensure that it will deliver the expected performance to the users. The Service Acceptance Criteria includes: 1. Users can operate the self-help menu easily 2. IT and PCS personnel can operate the revised Request Fulfilment process 3. IT and PCS personnel can deliver the new service levels for requests entered via the self-help menu - a reduction of 20% in fulfilment time targets 4. The measurement system incorporates changes in the priorities for fulfilling service requests. You have been asked to conduct the evaluation and make a recommendation to Change Management. You have received the following information while carrying out your review: a) The proposed changes will affect the service level targets for Request Fulfilment in the PCS contract but no updates to the service package are proposed b) No changes are proposed to interfaces from the request fulfilment process to the asset and Configuration Management process c) PCS has raised a contract issue about using the self-help service as there are no plans to provide funding for licences for their staff d) Some IT support groups are not included in the stakeholder list. They have complained about not being involved in the prototype e) Changes to the priorities in the measurement system have not been considered. Scenario Four You are the Head of Service Management for an organization with a small IT Service and Support department supporting 650 users and ten services. The organization has an Intranet where users can order printer supplies using a web based menu. This has been developed by the in-house development team. They have also developed a tool that is used to support Service Management. Users can request additional hardware and software from a catalogue by calling the Service Desk. An Incident is raised by the Service Desk which is then routed to the appropriate people for review and approval. The Service Desk also assigns security profiles to users. A report showing the Projected Service Availability is provided to the Service Desk every week. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) has asked you to investigate how to reduce the costs of IT support. Based on your experience you believe that costs could be reduced by reducing the number of calls to the Service Desk. You start by analyzing the calls received by the Service Desk over the last twelve months by call category. You propose that a new menu will be added to the Intranet for relevant call categories. Users will be asked to select items from this menu for appropriate call categories instead of calling the Service Desk. A supporting request fulfilment process will be introduced. Page 2 of 5

Scenario Five You are the Head of Service Transition for a large organization. There are twenty-one critical services which are used 24- hours a day, every day of the year. These are supported by IT Operations staff who work in shifts. Change Management has been in place for three months. A Change Advisory Board (CAB) meets once a week on Monday. An Emergency Change Advisory Board (ECAB) is convened for urgent, high priority changes. Both of these bodies include representation from Service Management, IT Operations, and relevant business areas. You have received a complaint from the Production Manager. The IT service that is critical to his business process was unavailable yesterday between 22:00 and 22:10. He had not been made aware of this outage in advance. A better time would have been when all his users were at a daily team meeting between 21:00 and 22:00. Team meetings are held at different times depending on the production process. No change record was created. You reviewed the incident records and found that an alert was raised for this service at 21:30. The database was running out of space and the service would stop in about 24-hours if nothing was done. The Operations engineer on the next shift executed a standard script to extend the database. The service was unavailable for ten minutes while the script was executed. This script is used about once a month for all services. It sometimes fails for unknown reasons. The engineer did not think he had to get approval from Change Management for this routine activity. You checked the Change Policy and discovered that it did not include guidance on how to manage this type of change. The Policy does include procedures for managing Emergency changes, Standard changes and Normal changes. You decide to add guidance about which procedure, if any, should be used to manage this type of change. Scenario Six You have recently joined a large cargo service company as a Senior Project Manager and you are responsible for managing a business system upgrade. You have been told that this system was problematic when it was first implemented. In summary there were three major issues: 1. Many of the system functions designed were considered not fit for use by the business users. This needed major rework and caused substantial delays to launch 2. The Service Desk agents and the specialists supporting the new system were not able to collect the right information for problem resolutions. This was partly due to an error of the packaged data collection tool and partly due to some support staff not being appropriately trained 3. There were several unplanned outages and the recovery of system and data took considerable time. This caused the business functions to miss their own service targets and commitments to external clients. You believe that these problems were all caused by the lack of an appropriate test strategy for the system prior to its launch. To avoid similar problems from happening again you want to use appropriate test models which can provides reference test scripts and test conditions on various service elements for this upgrade. These have all been proven in similar projects you led previously. Page 3 of 5

Scenario Seven A global bank has purchased an anti-fraud solution from a security vendor which provides monitoring and detection of fraudulent transactions going through its Stock Trading System (STS). This new solution is described in the diagram below: efraud Repository efraud Network Feed global Fraudulent incidents To RE databases Firewall Internet Zone Intranet Zone Log File Risk Database Local Area Network Stock Trading Databases Risk Engine (RE) Transaction Monitor (TM) & Stock Trading systems The Transaction Monitor (TM) runs on the same server with STS. It collects transaction data from STS and puts the data away in a log-file ready for manual analysis for abnormal transactions by the Bank. It also transfers the transaction data to the Risk Engine (RE) for real-time fraud detection. The RE is connected to its Risk Database and receives information from the TM. It monitors all real-time transactions against a set of pre-built trading policies, rules and patterns stored in its connected Risk Database, so that it can perform real-time fraud detection. The RE is also connected to the vendors global web-based efraud Repository. This hosted repository incrementally feeds the RE database with new fraudulent patterns detected globally. The vendor starts charging licence fees when the RE is connected to this hosted repository. You are the Bank s project manager and you need to develop a release and deployment plan by observing the following release planning guidelines: Use a phased approach to deliver a portion of the overall system functions incrementally in each release unit Test performance impact of the new solution on the STS before the system is fully launched Avoid the licence charge until the overall solution is fully tested and launched Page 4 of 5

Scenario Eight You have just started a new job as the Configuration Manager within a food and drinks company. You are the process owner for Service Asset and Configuration Management. The IT director has asked you to ensure that process improvements are aligned with the business needs of the organization by: Ensuring the integrity of service assets and configurations, to maintain compliance with corporate policies Being effective and efficient Providing quality information on service assets and configurations to support other processes. There are six external audits scheduled for manufacturing in the next year and one of the large software manufacturers is coming to do an audit of their software licenses in four months. The IT director wants you to ensure that there are minimal non conformances against Service Asset and Configuration Management in these audits. Assets, Configuration Items, (CIs), and changes are logged in the Configuration Management System, (CMS). You have been given a summary of data shown in Table 1. Table 1 Summary of data from the CMS Service Business area Number of service % audited assets / CIs assets / CIs with non-conformances Service A Financial 250 10 Service B Marketing 500 Not audited Service C Manufacturing 1000 Not audited Service D Administration 750 Not audited Service Asset Business area Number of service assets / CIs % audited assets / CIs with non-conformances Hardware assets with financial value All 10000 5 Hardware assets that have fully depreciated and no All 3000 5 longer have financial value Software assets All 26000 25 A discovery tool was installed last year, and the Configuration Manager created a schedule to use this tool to verify the configuration of discoverable assets. Configuration Management plans were written a few years ago when the CMS was implemented but there have been no updates to these plans since. Your initial investigation showed that the only process documentation is a one page workflow for updating the status of service assets as they progress through their lifecycle. You suspect that the summary data in Table 1 is not necessarily correct and that the level of breakdown of configuration items is probably too detailed in some areas and not detailed enough in other areas. You have been told that there are a high percentage of urgent changes and some unauthorized changes. You know from experience that these conditions will lead to inaccuracies in the configuration information. Page 5 of 5