Peoplecert ITIL Intermediate Module - Service Offerings and Agreements - ITIL-SOA

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?

• 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. 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 additional resources.
• C. 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.
• D. 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.

Scenario
A clothing manufacturer has made a decision to supplement factory-based retail outlets by opening a series of stores at out-of-town shopping malls.
The internal IT organization provides support to many mission-critical business systems for both the manufacturing and retail operations. It must increase its portfolio of services and service options to meet the planned new expansion. Typically, the business is subject to seasonal patterns of demand, which recently have begun to exceed the capability of some of the IT services. This has led to periods of poor performance of some of the critical systems and therefore to degraded service quality. In periods of minimal demand, there is a surplus of capacity and performance is optimal.
There is concern that the additional business demand from the new stores will exacerbate these service performance issues.
The board of directors, made up of representatives from each business unit, has asked for a review of the business supply and demand issues currently being faced by the IT organization. Many service management processes have been implemented including service portfolio management and capacity management. However, IT does not have a demand management process.
Additionally, performance levels on many of the supporting services have remained unchanged for the past 3 years, even though some may now be less relevant to the overall performance of the critical services.
Refer to the Scenario.
The review of the supply and demand issues concluded that the implementation of a demand management process could help the IT organization address the issues. Which one of the following options provides the BEST solution to both the problems currently being faced and those related to the proposed expansion?

• A. The service portfolio should be reviewed and an analysis carried out of each business unit's requirements to understand their current usage of the IT services and where seasonal variations lead to fluctuations in usage.
  Discussions should take place with the business units to impose limits within specific time periods for each business unit's usage of IT services.
  Work with business relationship management and capacity management to develop long term plans to meet the extra demand resulting from the company's expansion plans.
• B. The service portfolio should be reviewed and an analysis carried out of each business unit's requirements in order to understand their patterns of business activity (PBA) and corresponding usage of the IT services.
  Differentiated service offerings should be developed to match PBA; this will make better use of available IT resources. Supporting service performance targets should be amended to reflect these changes.
  Work with business relationship management and capacity management to develop long term plans to meet the extra demand resulting from the company's expansion plans.
• C. The service portfolio should be reviewed and the business unit's cumulative service usage should be reviewed, monitored and analyzed.
  Work with the business to develop short-term measures to manage demand for the IT services, such as delayed or batch processing of retail transactions.
  Service levels should be reviewed to take into account changes to supporting service performance targets and, where applicable, agreements should be updated through change management.
• D. An analysis should be carried out of each business unit's patterns of business activity (PBA), and appropriate services for each business unit selected from the service catalogue.
  In conjunction with the finance department, a revised cost model should be introduced to allow for the fluctuation in usage and costs.
  Differential charging should be introduced to address the issues of service quality.