ITIL Service Capability – Service Operation and Analysis — Question 2

Scenario -
A travel company specializes in providing complete holiday packages to meet customer requirements. There have been instances over the past year where the business has been unable to process holiday bookings due to failure of the IT services. Sales have been lost and the failure has been raised at board level. The IT director has assured the board that the situation will be rectified.
Most holiday bookings are made either by telephone via the company's call centre or through a dedicated website. Both interface with the same back-end booking-processing service. Apart from the call centre and website, the main business services map onto organizational departments and cover: marketing, finance, business operations and central administration.
After some initial investigation within the IT organization, it is clear that the intermittent failures, which were related to a lack of capacity, have occurred during exceptional peak holiday booking periods. The IT organization is not certain when or if these are going to occur in the future. Some booking periods are predictable, such as those associated with promotional offers. Other patterns are totally unpredictable as they often coincide with bad weather being experienced where customers live.
You have been asked how the activities of demand management, based on ITIL practices, can be used to address this issue.
Refer to Scenario -
Which one of the following options is the BEST set of actions required to resolve the issue?

Answer options

• A. Identify the pattern of customer enquiries for holiday bookings and the resulting volume, frequency and location of staff activity. Document these as patterns of business activity (PBA) Gain an understanding of the different roles that are performed by staff from all business units and how these relate to the PBA for all business processes. Use this information to identify any shortfall in capacity and create cost estimates of additional resource required to enable the IT services to meet the PBA. Recommend that, where PBA are very predictable, investment should be made in additional resource. Where PBA are unpredictable, the risks associated with railing to meet demand should be discussed with the business managers, and mitigation actions agreed.
• B. Identify the pattern of customer enquiries for holiday bookings and the resulting volume, frequency and location of staff activity. Document these as PBA. Gain an understanding of the different roles that are performed by the call centre staff and how these relate to the PBA for the call centre business processes. Use this information to identify any shortfall in capacity and create cost estimates of additional resource required to enable the IT services to meet the PBA. Discuss the risks associated with failing to meet demand with the business managers. Reach agreement on how to avoid a repeat of the IT failures caused by demand at busy periods.
• C. Identify and understand the PBA resulting from metrics of all the IT services. Ensure that the volume, frequency and location of service use is taken into account. Gain an understanding of how the PBA relate to the use of the IT assets especially the hardware and software that may be the cause of the IT failures. Once these activities have been completed, the PBA will be used to plan and implement sufficient capacity to meet all demand at all times. Discuss the risks associated with failing to meet demand with capacity management and technical staff. Reach agreement on how to avoid a repeat of the IT failures caused by demand at busy periods.
• D. Immediately implement demand management, document the process and allocate roles and responsibilities. The demand manager should initiate an activity to identify and understand user profiles resulting from business use of the IT services. Code the user profiles linking them to the associated business roles. Match the user profiles to the IT services and analyze any shortfall in capacity required to meet the business objectives. Create a business case for the additional resource required to exceed the business demand for the IT services to account for unpredictable business activity. Work with service portfolio management and financial management to agree on the approval of the investment and initiate the project to acquire all the

Correct answer: A

Explanation

Option A is the best choice as it comprehensively addresses the need to identify patterns of customer behavior and relate them to capacity requirements while also considering both predictable and unpredictable demand. Options B and C focus too narrowly on either the call center or IT services without a broader organizational perspective. Option D suggests immediate implementation without careful analysis of patterns and risks, which is less systematic in approach.