ITIL Foundation (Version 5) Free Sample Questions

ITIL defines a product as a configuration of an organization's resources designed to offer value to a consumer. A service offering is a formal description of one or more services designed to address the needs of a target consumer group, so it describes services rather than being the configuration of resources itself. An output is a tangible or intangible deliverable of an activity. A resource (people, information, technology, money and so on) is one of the things a product is configured from, not the configuration as a whole.

Utility is what the service does, its fitness for purpose: the app has the functions users need and processes transactions. Warranty is how the service performs, its fitness for use: the assurance that it meets agreed requirements for availability, capacity, continuity and security. Because the servers crash at peak hours and users cannot log in, availability and capacity fail, so the service has utility but lacks warranty. It cannot deliver full value, because value needs both utility and warranty, and it does not lack utility, because the functions work whenever the service is available.

An output is a tangible or intangible deliverable of an activity (for example, a generated report or a deployed server). An outcome is a result for a stakeholder enabled by one or more outputs (for example, being able to make a business decision based on that report). The other statements reverse the two terms or tie them to value, costs or to who produces them, which is not how ITIL defines output and outcome.

In a service relationship the sponsor is the role that authorizes the budget for service consumption, so the CIO who approves the budget is the sponsor. The customer is the role that defines the requirements and takes responsibility for the outcomes of service consumption (here the Sales Manager), and the user is the role that uses the service (the Sales Representatives). The service provider is the organization that delivers the cloud CRM service; the CIO is on the consumer side of the relationship.

The ITIL Foundation (Version 5) syllabus names three components of a service offering: transfer of goods (ownership of a physical or digital item passes to the consumer, for example a phone supplied with a mobile plan), access to resources (the consumer may use resources that the provider still owns, for example a network or cloud platform under a licence), and service actions (activities the provider performs for the consumer, for example resetting a password). A service request is a user's request that triggers an agreed service action, and value streams are the provider's flows of work; neither is a component of the offering itself.

Value co-creation means that value is created together by the provider and the consumer through their service relationship: the provider supplies resources and capabilities, and the consumer uses them, with its own resources, to achieve the outcomes it wants. Value is therefore not a package delivered one way to a passive consumer. It is not created only by the provider improving its internal processes, it is not a fixed property of a product apart from how the consumer uses it, and it is not just the provider's financial return; ITIL defines value as the perceived benefits, usefulness and importance of something.