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ITIL® V3 Intermediate Capability Stream:
OPERATIONAL SUPPORT AND ANALYSIS (OS&A) CERTIFICATE
SCENARIO BOOKLET
Scenario One
You have recently been appointed as the Problem Management Process Owner of a large global enterprise. You will
be working with regional Problem Managers in all areas of the business. A common Problem Management System
and Known Error Database (KEDB) are used worldwide.
Although the Problem Management process was implemented over twelve months ago, Senior Management
perceives that the process is not achieving its goals, which include:
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Increasing the availability of mission critical services
Proactively reducing the impact of incidents
Reducing the cost of support services
You have been hired to ensure continual process improvement and to ensure the process is being performed
consistently worldwide.
Whilst meeting with the Service Desk staff, you learn that analysts frequently identify problems, only to learn that
those problems have been investigated and closed without resolution, or have been closed pending completion of a
change. In some cases, you find that a Known Error record has been added to the KEDB; however, few of the
technical teams that have been documenting workarounds and Known Errors have received training, and as a result
the records are often incorrectly categorized, duplicated or out-of-date.
You learn from discussions with the Problem Managers that the following key metrics are produced and presented to
Senior Management:
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The number of problems recorded
The number of problems closed
The backlog of outstanding problems
The number of Known Errors added to the KEDB
Reports show that problem records are being closed fairly quickly and that the number of Known Errors added to the
KEDB is increasing. Two of the Problem Managers have a considerably larger backlog than the others.
You learn that Major Problem reviews are typically only conducted when a Problem has received the attention of
Senior Management.
You have made some conclusions and feel there are changes you can make quickly to better align Problem
Management with ITIL best practice and achieve some immediate process performance improvement.
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Scenario Two
Traduce is a large international trading company with warehouses in five continents and customers all over the world.
Its internal IT department introduced a Service Desk and an Incident Management process based on ITIL best
practice, a year ago. The Service Desk is available 24-hours a day and accepts calls in twenty different languages,
but logs all calls in English.
Today, there is a general feeling amongst the business and users that the quality of support has improved
significantly. The IT Manager wants to document this, and is planning to use a baseline that was taken before the
Service Desk function and the Incident Management process were introduced.
Scenario Three
Harrison’s Manufacturing is a mid-sized furniture manufacturing company that has recently won an international
contract. Harrison’s has also recently merged with Zimmerman’s, a German engineering company that specializes in
modern furniture designs. These designs will be offered via Harrison’s web site.
Harrison’s U.S. headquarters are located in Georgia and its manufacturing facility is located in Illinois. A new
manufacturing facility in California will open later this year. The California facility will initially hire 75 new employees
and will utilize state-of-the-art equipment. The existing IT Help Desk is based in Georgia, and provides service to
Harrison’s 900+ employees from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. These hours will need to be extended when the new facility opens in
California and consideration must also be given to how to best support the U.S.-based traveling sales staff must also
be considered.
Harrison’s IT management team recognizes the need to ensure the services provided by IT are capable of meeting
the high availability requirements of the rapidly growing business. Management is committed to ensuring that IT
services satisfy customer requirements in the most cost-effective way possible.
One of the first projects that the management team has launched is focused on improving the incident and problem
management processes, and transforming the IT Help Desk into a Service Desk. They want the newly launched
Service Desk to handle service requests in addition to incidents and to be more involved in communicating the status
of planned changes.
A web site that offers self-help capability by allowing users to perform password resets, and the ability to submit an
email if additional support is needed, is currently working well after-hours.
The 115 Zimmerman’s employees consist of engineers and non-English speaking office staff who currently obtain
support by sending an email to [email protected]. A small team of technicians handles the emails on a
first-come, first-served basis.
You are the Service Desk Manager and have been researching best practice in an effort to determine the best way to
structure and staff the Service Desk, to meet the diverse needs of IT users. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) has
asked you to help her and the staff reporting directly to her, understand the various options for structuring the Service
Desk. She has also asked you to recommend an option that best meets Harrison’s requirements.
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Scenario Four
An IT Services outsourcing company is going through the process of procuring a new tool for automated Event
monitoring. There is no experience within the organization with Event monitoring so a decision has been made to
recruit a new member of staff to work exclusively on establishing Event monitoring for at least the first twelve months
of their employment.
During the interviews, all candidates are asked the same question, which is: “What are the main steps you plan to
undertake in the first month of this new role?”
Each of the candidates initially suggested that the categorization of the significance of events will need to be defined
and agreed and identified several members of staff that will need to be involved in this assessment to ensure the
categorization meets the organization requirements, including Customers, the Service Level Manager, the Service
Desk, the Development Team and representatives from the Incident and Change Management processes.
Scenario Five
A large global manufacturing company has experienced rapid growth and very positive profit margins.
systems have generally been able to support the growth and on occasions have even facilitated the growth.
The IT
The IT team currently operates a global Virtual Service Desk and are becoming concerned that despite their best
efforts, the number of Incidents reported to the Service Desk increases significantly every month. The majority of the
increase in Incidents has been attributed to user enquiries. At the same time, the numbers of Requests For Change
(RFC), which are mostly minor repetitive changes, are also increasing, causing problems with implementation of the
changes within the agreed target timescales.
The Chief Information Officer (CIO) has initiated a project to look into the reasons for these increases in more detail,
and to see what can be done to reduce the number of Incidents and RFCs. He has asked the team to look at the
latest version of ITIL to see if there are any ideas here that could help. The organization has been using ITIL for
approximately three years.
Scenario Six
The IT unit of a large construction company has experienced difficulty maintaining confidentiality of information,
particularly over the past year. This has resulted in company confidential information being leaked to the media and
to their competitors, with the result being a loss of business and market confidence.
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) has asked all business units to look at their procedures in detail, to ensure that
efforts are made to stop these leaks.
The Chief Information Officer (CIO) has discussed the situation with all the staff who report directly to him and they
have decided that they must review the Accountability and Responsibilities for protecting access to Services and
information in order to combat this issue.
Availability Management, IT Service Continuity Management and Information Security Management processes
already exist within the organization but some feel that an Access Management process should also be introduced.
They feel however, that roles must be clearly defined so that there is no duplication of effort.
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Scenario Seven
An IT Department of approximately 250 staff members established a Problem Management process on a trial basis,
approximately one year ago. The department now has plans to review the process to see how effective and efficient it
has been during this period and whether it should continue in operation.
The perception amongst IT staff is divided; some members of staff think that the process has been a complete waste
of time, whilst others believe that it has helped deliver a better overall level of service for the department and to the
end-user population of 14,000 staff.
The Problem Management team currently consists of two full-time members of staff, with one team member who is
currently on loan from the Service Desk to carry out Trend Analysis.
Scenario Eight
The IT services for a logistics and distribution organization are provided by an internal IT section, which manages
many underpinning services provided by suppliers, in order to achieve successful delivery of the IT services. The IT
section is responsible for the design, transition and operation of the IT services, as well as their development and
improvement.
For a number of years, the organization has used an Incident Management process with a supporting tool at their
Service Desk, but has almost no other Service Management processes or activities in place.
They are planning to implement the processes within the Service Operation and Service Transition Lifecycle stages in
the near future and realize that their existing Service Desk tool does not have the functionality or capability to support
these planned additions.
To define the requirements for a new Service Management tool to support the planned Service Management
activities, the IT section has decided to use the MoSCoW technique, summarized below:
MoSCoW:
 M – MUST have
 S – SHOULD have
 C – COULD have
 W – WON’T have this time, but WOULD like
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