ITIL Intermediate Capability Stream:

OPERATIONAL SUPPORT AND ANALYSIS (OSA)

CERTIFICATE

Sample Paper 2, version 6.1

Gradient Style, Complex Multiple Choice

SCENARIO BOOKLET
This booklet contains the scenarios upon which the eight examination questions will be based. All
questions are contained within the Question Booklet and each question will clearly state the scenario
to which the question relates. In order to answer each of the eight questions, you will need to read the
related scenario carefully.
On the basis of the information provided in the scenario, you will be required to select which of the
four answer options provided (A, B, C or D) you believe to be the optimum answer. You may choose
ONE answer only, and the Gradient Scoring system works as follows:

If you select the CORRECT answer, you will be awarded 5 marks for the question
If you select the SECOND BEST answer, you will be awarded 3 marks for the question
If you select the THIRD BEST answer, you will be awarded 1 mark for the question
If you select the DISTRACTER (the incorrect answer), you will receive no marks for the
question

In order to pass this examination, you must achieve a total of 28 marks or more out of a maximum of
40 marks (70%).

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Scenario One
You are the IT service manager for a large financial services provider, and are responsible for the
end-to-end services provided by the existing legacy mainframe systems. You report to the chief
information officer (CIO). Reporting to you are the development teams, the project and programme
management team, the IT operations teams, including the data centre manager, and the continual
service improvement team.
In order to update the services and to position the company for the commercial challenges ahead, it
has been agreed at board level that the infrastructure will be redesigned and the current 20 systems
migrated and consolidated onto a single new service. This new service will greatly reduce IT operating
costs for both manpower and technology, and will enable the business divisions to radically
restructure their operating capability.
The transformation programme started three months ago. It is still in the planning phase and has only
just received final sign-off from the board. Resources are currently being identified and engaged to
join the programme team, the communication plan is being developed, and the programme risks,
assumptions and constraints are being refined. No detailed design has yet been undertaken, and the
overall programme is expected to last two years.
You have learned that the programme director is calling an initial meeting next week to officially
launch the programme, to outline the programme proposition, and to get input from all those involved.

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Page 2 of 9

Scenario Two
A well-known insurance company has improved its business over the last 10 years by exploiting the
internet. It relies on many IT services to provide its external customers with the ability to obtain fast
and accurate quotes from the companys website.
It is a dynamic company that retains a competitive advantage by responding quickly to trends in the
insurance market with new offerings to external customers. This requires that the staff and business
processes are flexible so that the company can respond rapidly to market needs. Accordingly, the
company encourages staff to change or share roles regularly. This results in many requests to move
or purchase IT equipment. There are also frequent requests to make changes to system access when
users change roles.
You are the service desk manager and joined the company three months ago. Until now, the service
desk has dealt with all service requests as incidents. You are in the process of planning to implement
a request fulfilment process. The process will be initiated by service desk staff and involves other
support groups. Service requests will continue to be logged in the incident management system but
will be categorized as requests for workflow and reporting purposes.
You are analysing the most frequently occurring service requests that the new process will handle
and have produced a report of some of the common calls that are received by the service desk. This
report is shown below:
Item #
1

Incident description
User reported error with PC faulty mouse replaced by desktop team

User request to add two new fields to the customer screen of the sales system

User request to purchase a new toner cartridge for printer

User reported slow response when using e-mail applications

User request for advice on how to use a spreadsheet application

User reported a printer failure

User forgot password password reset

User required additional access to the sales system

User submitted request to move their PC to a different office

10

User unable to log into PC

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Page 3 of 9

Scenario Three
An organization has recently purchased a new event management support tool that the service
operation team is in the process of installing and configuring. A particular question has come up
regarding the retention of data relating to events that occur.
All people involved have agreed that events that are classified as warning or exception need to be
retained for a lengthy period after the event has been dealt with.
However, concerns regarding the amount of space that will be required and the volume of data to be
stored and potentially accessed, have caused some senior technical staff to propose that events
categorized as informational need only be retained for a minimal period. A retention period of one
week has been proposed, the logic being that if any follow-up issues have not occurred by then they
are extremely unlikely to occur at all.
Other team members have argued that this does not make sense. The data may be needed for some
time beyond this point, so should be retained indefinitely.
The organizations legal department has advised that there may also be legislative or compliance
issues and if so the data may need to be retained for up to six years.

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Page 4 of 9

Scenario Four
A financial services organization with offices worldwide has begun a three-year project to replace
many of the legacy applications hosted on their mainframe with web-based services. The project is
part of a strategic corporate initiative to streamline key business processes and to make better use of
IT to create competitive advantage. The goals of this initiative are to:

Reduce costs
Maximize resources
Improve enterprise-wide information security
Ensure compliance with legislative and regulatory controls.

When the new web-based services are available, varying levels of access to these services will be
granted to employees, contractors and, in some cases, select customers. Business sponsors have
emphasized that because the current market place is extremely dynamic and competitive, it is critical
that access is granted as quickly as possible when requests are submitted. However, security is also
a concern and the business expects IT to play a key role in securing the organizations information
assets.
A new access management process has been implemented that is based on ITIL best practices. A
project is underway to clarify the procedures for creating and utilizing user profiles to grant and
manage access on an ongoing basis.

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Owner The Official ITIL Accreditor
Page 5 of 9

Scenario Five
A large insurance company has grown rapidly in the past several years through a series of
acquisitions. The acquired companies continue to operate fairly autonomously, each with its own IT
department; however, several corporate systems, such as e-mail and an enterprise resource planning
(ERP) system, have been deployed. A new corporate document management system (DMS) is in the
process of being deployed.
A centralized service desk provides a single point of contact for managing incidents and the separate
IT departments each support their own systems and also provide second and third-line support for the
corporate systems to their respective user communities. A common set of high-level incident
management procedures is being followed, although each of the IT departments is still using its own
logging and management system.
The chief executive officer (CEO) oversees a chief information officer (CIO) group comprising the
CIOs from each of the separate IT departments. The CEO has challenged this group to identify
opportunities to reduce costs, share resources, and consolidate operational activities. The CEO is
also frustrated by recent problems encountered when deploying the new DMS and significant outages
affecting the ERP system. To date, a lack of data gathering standards has made it difficult to
investigate and analyse these problems. However, the CIO Group needs to quickly determine why
these problems are occurring and to establish ways of minimizing the impact, because both of these
systems are critical to the companys overall success.
Discussion is under way to determine how to make best use of existing resources particularly the
technical and application management resources to deal with these issues. Each of the IT
departments is experiencing staffing shortages and most CIOs indicate that their technical and
application management functions are currently over-utilized.

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Owner The Official ITIL Accreditor
Page 6 of 9

Scenario Six
A construction company designs and implements customized projects for clients. The company is
heavily dependent on their IT organization which develops specialized in-house solutions for them.
Several times in the past, these solutions provided a clear strategic advantage over their competition
and for this reason the company has retained a high level of specialized experts. The company is also
using a standard enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and a standard desktop software
package and has acquired a high level of expertise in supporting these services.
ITIL best practices have been implemented within the company and most of the processes are
considered effective and efficient. The service desk owns the problem management process. It is
perceived as being very effective because it managed to solve 103 out of 104 identified problems last
year, and the mean time for solving a problem was five days. Service level agreements (SLAs) are
also in place and are actively used. The quality of service, together with the highly respected SLAs,
has built IT a solid reputation within the company.
For these reasons, the CIO is particularly shocked about recent user complaints that the number of
incidents is continually increasing and has reached an unacceptable level. You have been asked to
look into the situation and to make a proposal for the best way forward.
After analysing the incident reports from the last three years, you find that the number of incidents has
doubled to over 300,000 per year. In the same period the number of users has increased by just 12
percent. You also note that there appear to be 2,000 incidents of the same type for the ERP system.
Last year, the service desk was able to solve 81 percent of all incidents immediately while users were
on the phone. Over the course of the year there were only 29 major incidents, all of which were
solved inside the agreed resolution times. In fact, over 98 percent of all incidents were solved inside
of agreed SLA resolution times.

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Scenario Seven
The IT department of a large European supermarket chain consists of 250 staff. Generally the
department has a good reputation, but as the company has expanded, service levels have dropped.
The IT department started to implement service management six months ago; the service desk (SD)
was reviewed and improvements made, new staff employed and a revised incident management
process was introduced. While internal users welcomed this change, a number of issues were
identified.

The following report provides a representative sample of records from the incident management
system. You are the SD manager and must review the report to identify the issues that must be dealt
with.
No

Category

Incident description

1010

Desktop

Unable to log in to the PC network

1030

Request

Forgotten password

1060

Request

User submitting RFC

Escalated to SD manager.

1110

Server

Windows server reboot

Logged by server team.

1120

Request

Request for new toner cartridge

Escalated to desktop team.

1205

Desktop

PC locked up when logging in

Escalated to server team.

1240

Network

Network slow

1250

Printer

Printing problems

1315

Request

New PC request

1330

e-mail

Slow response sending e-mail

1350

Server

Network is very slow

1405

Network

PC hung blue screen error

1425

Desktop

PC log-in problems

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Resolution
Escalated to network team.
Resolved by network team.
Could not verify user details.
Escalated to desktop team.

Escalated to server team.

Network team later confirming its
resolution.
Could not locate details of printer.
Escalated to network team.
Escalated to SD manager.
Could not locate user details so user
requested to telephone back later if it does
not improve.
Escalated to desktop team.
Closed by network team.
Escalated to server team.
Desktop team closed incident after visit to
user.
Third occurrence today so escalated to SD
manager as possible problem.

AXELOS Limited 2012

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The swirl logoTM is a trade mark of AXELOS Limited
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Page 8 of 9

Scenario Eight
A company is seeking to recruit a service management expert to strengthen their service operation
teams, in particular the technical and operations management division. Through the standard
selection process each candidate was asked to prepare a statement outlining what they believed to
be the main objective and purpose of service operation.
The statements would then be used to select a candidate for second interview.
Candidate #1
Maintain operational stability while introducing new or changed services into supported
environments. The purpose of the service operation stage of the service lifecycle is to coordinate and carry out the activities and processes required to deliver and manage services at
agreed levels from one state to another while managing risk to business users and customers.
Service operation is also responsible for the ongoing management of the technology that is used
to deliver and support services.
Candidate #2
Maintain stability in service operation, allowing for changes in design, scale, scope and
service levels. The purpose of the service operation stage of the service lifecycle is to coordinate and carry out the activities and processes required to deliver and manage services at
agreed levels to business users and customers. Service operation is also responsible for the
ongoing management of the technology that is used to deliver and support services.
Candidate #3
Manage services in supported environments, achieving effectiveness and efficiency to
ensure value for the customer, the user and the service provider. The purpose of the service
operation stage of the service lifecycle is to achieve service quality, operational efficiency and
business continuity, and to ensure that the portfolio of supported services continues to be aligned
with business and user needs. Service operation is also responsible for management of the
technology used to deliver and support services.
Candidate #4
Maintain stability in the design and development of services and service management
practices. The purpose of the service operation stage of the service lifecycle is to co-ordinate the
principles and methods for converting strategic objectives into portfolios of services and service
assets to be managed. Service operation is also responsible for managing the ongoing
expectation of service performance and alignment of capabilities and business strategies.

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Reproduction of this material requires the permission of AXELOS Limited.
The swirl logoTM is a trade mark of AXELOS Limited
ITIL is a registered trade mark of AXELOS Limited
Owner The Official ITIL Accreditor
Page 9 of 9