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. 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.
• B. 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.
• 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 large, privately owned company has an internal IT organization that runs most of its IT operations from the head office. There has been a history of confusion about what is required from the services and what has actually been achieved, particularly from a warranty perspective. This has resulted in a strained relationship between the business units and the IT organization.
Some service-based agreements exist between IT and the customers, where all levels of response to incidents were set to the same targets. Availability targets have not been reviewed for at least two years. There have been a number of complaints by key customers claiming that the IT staff have been resolving incidents and implementing change requests based on operational ease rather than business priority. This is despite operationally robust processes being in place for incident, change and problem management.
A plan has been put in place to improve the level of the IT service delivered to the organization.
Retirement of the post-holder meant that the first action was to appoint a new IT director. The opportunity was taken to select a candidate from an external organization, who was committed to the ITIL framework. The new IT director believes that good IT service management practices are essential.
The IT director plans to implement many of the service management processes and has already overseen the creation of a basic service catalogue. The IT director is sure that many of the current issues can be rectified through the implementation of service level management (SLM) and has therefore directed that service level agreements (SLA) be introduced for the services provided before moving onto other areas. You have been asked to lead the project to establish SLAs for the IT services.
Refer to the Scenario.
Which one of the following sequence of activities would be the BEST approach to establishing service levels agreements (SLA) in the organization?

• A. Meet with the IT operations team, specifically, those involved in incident, availability and capacity management, to define what level of service they can offer to the business against each service in the service catalogue.
  Meet with the appropriate customer representatives to give them a clear understanding of the levels of service IT can offer.
  Produce and agree an SLA and ensure it is signed by representatives of both parties.
  Document and agree OLAs with the service operation teams.
  Ensure all parties understand their responsibilities and enforce penalties for non-compliance.
  Once both agreements have been signed, all service level targets are then formally monitored and reviewed.
• B. Identify all the services currently delivered using the service catalogue.
  Define a primarily service-based approach to implementing service level agreements.
  Using the service templates already in use, meet with the appropriate customer representatives and, after discussion, produce formal SLRs which document the levels of service that the customer needs.
  Arrange meetings with the appropriate IT teams, specifically those involved in incident, availability and capacity management, to discuss, document and communicate the levels of service required.
  From these discussions operational level agreements (OLAs) are then produced.
  The SLRs and OLAs can be formally monitored, reported upon and reviewed at the agreed intervals.
• C. Identify all of the services currently delivered using the service catalogue.
  Define a primarily customer-based approach to implementing service levels agreements (SLAs).
  Using a pre-prepared pro-forma service level requirements (SLR) template, meet with the appropriate customer representatives to discuss and document their service level requirements.
  Arrange meetings with the appropriate IT teams, specifically those involved in incident, availability and capacity management, to discuss, document and agree the levels of service required.
  Draft agreements from these discussions are then reviewed by service operations to ensure that no existing agreements will be compromised and, once this has been confirmed, the SLA is formally reviewed, agreed, and signed by both the customer and IT.
  The service level targets are then formally communicated, monitored, reported upon and reviewed at the agreed intervals.
• D. Identify all of the services currently delivered using the service catalogue.
  Define a primarily service-based approach to implementing service level agreements.
  Meet with the appropriate business representatives and, after discussion, produce a formal SLA that guarantees the levels of service that the business needs.
  Arrange meetings with the appropriate IT teams, specifically those involved in incident, availability and capacity management, to inform them of the service levels you have agreed Document and agree OLAs with the service operation teams.
  Once these are agreed and signed the OLAs are passed back to the business to demonstrate that IT will support the SLA and to build upon the trust between the two parties.