ITIL, which stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, is defined as a set of guidelines that helps software professionals to deliver the best IT services.
With the numerous benefits that ITIL produces, ITIL-certified professionals have a great demand in the IT industry. Companies look for ITIL professionals that will help them to boost their project deliveries and services.
ITIL guarantees that an IT professional is abreast of the best practices and solutions in any IT service management positions. The ITIL framework helps enhance IT operations no matter where the company is in the service management lifecycle, and helps companies cut costs while improving IT services. In addition, many organizations consider ITIL to be a well known language or model that uses its parallel skills that are more in sync between organizations.
One can take ITIL certification courses to improve their chances of getting a better job. However, one needs to crack interviews to get the job.
So, if you are looking for ITIL interview questions that can guide them through the process, you have stumbled upon just the right article for you.
Frequently asked ITIL interview questions that can help you prepare for the interview.
ABCs of ITIL
Before we move on to ITIL interview questions, let us first understand the basics of ITIL.
What do we mean by ITIL?
- As mentioned previously, ITIL is an acronym for Information Technology Infrastructure Library.
- These are a set of guidelines that have been curated over time by gathering, observing, and putting together some of the best practices that will help provide quality IT services.
- The IT industry is a highly dynamic industry that includes rapid changes in service practices and structures. This often forms a hurdle in the path of providing quality services consistently. ITIL professionals help in dealing with the problems.
- ITIL provides a framework that helps in standardizing the entire IT cycle. The guidelines cover planning, maintenance and delivery of the service’s lifecycle.
- One factor that needs to be acknowledged here is the fact that ITIL is often confused with COBIT. Asking the distinction between ITIL and COBIT is one of the common ITIL interview questions too.
- ITIL enables a company to implement business guidelines, whereas COBIT is used to integrate technology and information.
- ITIL comes with features like designing strategies for services and transitions. On the other hand, COBIT has features like controlling objectives and providing guidelines for management.
What are the benefits of ITIL?
Another one of the most frequently asked ITIL interview questions, you will be surprised to know, several people fumble upon this fundamental question.
Therefore, to please your interviewers, here are some of the most potent benefits of ITIL
Managing constant business and having track of frequent IT changes
Improving the success rate of project delivery.
Enhances capabilities and resources and helps in providing resources that are required and beneficial.
Provides best practices for service managements
Helps in boosting customer satisfaction.
Now that we have the basics of ITIL out of our way, let us look at the most usually asked ITIL interview questions.
ITIL interview questions and answers
1. State the basic features of ITIL
Based on a single language or terminology and helps in providing knowledge-centred support
Consist of service desk, strong process automation, and data integration capabilities
Provides deployment flexibility and helps in achieving consistent quality.
2. Mention the important stages of ITIL
Service strategy- To ensure the efficiency of routine tasks, services strategies help understand the benefits of market drive approaches.
Service design- This stage ensures that the agreed service is provided at a defined time and cost.
ITIL service transition- This stage is used to implement IT services. It also helps in ensuring coordination between Service Management Processes and services.
Service operations- This stage focuses on ensuring that the service meets the end-users expectations while maintaining the cost, and any potential issues and setbacks are uncovered.
Service improvement- Service incidents are common and therefore, this stage of ITIL helps in ensuring that the IT services can be recovered. It also provides a simplified analysis of the company and also provides measures for the company to recover.
3. Mention some of the advantages of ITIL.
Some of the potent advantages of ITIL are
Helps in boosting customer satisfaction by improving service availability.
Provides a clear structure of an organization
Enhances decision making processes and manages finances
Controls infrastructure services
4. What are the 4Ps in ITIL?
People (individuals associated with processes and procedures)
Processes (company’s ability to implement new reforms)
Products (services with underlying technology)
Partners (individuals who work with IT organizations to ensure the services are provided properly)
5. What are the phases in the PDSA cycle?
There are four phases that take in the PDSA cycle, which are
Plan: Identifying the problem and analyzing it
Do: Developing a potential solution and testing it
Check: Analyzing how effective the solution is and whether it could be improved in any way or not
Act: Implementing the solution finally
6. Mention the service providers attached with the ITIL process
An prevalent ITIL interview question, the various service providers attached with the process are
Internal service provider (dedicated resource of the business unit and helps in managing internal organization)
External service provider (helps in providing the IT services to external customers; not bound to an individual, business, or market)
Shared service unit (an autonomous unit that acts as an extension to ISPs)
7. What are the objectives of incident management?
Ensures regulated methods that help in providing efficient responses, analyses, reporting of incidents, management and documentation.
Processes communication to IT staffs
Helps in aligning incident management priorities and activities correctly.
Provides satisfaction of the users
8. What is a service level agreement?
Service level agreement is defined as the commitment between a service provider and the end-user. It represents the level of service prepared by the service provider.
9. What do we mean by operational level agreement?
An operational level agreement helps in defining the relationship between an IT service provider and an organization. Forming an essential part of the ITIL and ITSM framework, this agreement occurs at an operational level.
10. What is event management in ITIL?
In ITIL, event management helps in ensuring that the configured items and services are observed continually. This helps in filtering and categorizing the events which help in deducing a specific action.
11. Mention the steps involved in continuous service improvement
Another common ITIL interview question that people often fail to answer correctly, the steps that are involved are
Analysing the areas to improve
Knowing what to research on
Collecting the data
Processing the information
Analysing the information as well as data
Using the information properly
Implementing the improvements required
12. What are the layers of service management measures?
The layers are
Progress
Compliance
Effectiveness
Efficiency
13. How is a change request different from a service request?
The most common difference observed is that a change request is a proposal made to bring about a change in a system or product.
On the other hand, service requests are submitted by a user, including access to IT service or bringing about change in the standard.
14. Mention the levels of SLA
There are 3 levels in SLA, which are :-
Customer service level agreement (between a service provider and customer)
Internal service legal agreement (between IT and internal customers)
Vendor service legal agreement (between developer and vendor)
15. What are the steps involved in designing the services?
Consisting of 8 measures, the steps that are involved in service designing are
Designing coordination
Management at service levels
Managing service catalogue
Management of availability
Managing capacity
Management of information security
Management of continuity of IT services
Managing supply of services
16. Differentiate between ITIL v2 and ITIL v3
Well, we have to include the most frequently asked question in our ITIL interview questions list. There are several differences between ITIL v2 and ITIL v3 but to make it easier for you, some of the most basic differences are listed down below
ITIL v2 (process-oriented approach)
focuses on process, product and people
includes security management
focuses on strategy and design of services
10 processes + 2 functions
ITIL v3 (lifecycle-based approach)
focuses on process, product, people and partners
security management is a separate process
equal attention is given to all processes
26 processes + 4 functions
17. What differentiates a project from a process?
The primary difference that helps differentiate the process from the project is that the process has to end sometime. But, on the other hand, the process has no deadline and is continuous.
18. Name some of the knowledge management systems.
Definitive Media Library (DML)
Capacity Management Information System (CMIS)
Known Error Database (KEDB)
Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
19. In ITIL, what are the goals of problem management?
Some of the goals of problem management in ITIL are
Identifying the recurrent service incidents
Preventing recurrence of service incidents
Analyzing the source of the incidents
20. What are the responsibilities bestowed upon the Service Desk?
Categorizing and prioritizing the incidents
Examining the incidents and helping in resolving them
Making the incident management report.
21. What does one mean by a Balanced Scorecard (BSC)?
Balanced ScoreCard is a strategic planning and management system that is a part of ITIL 4 transformation and is used to assess an organization from four different perspectives. These are extensively used in governments, businesses and nonprofit organizations worldwide.
If you think these are enough? Then you are in for a surprise. Let us look at some more ITIL interview questions that will help you to fully ace the interview.
22. Define the concept of IT policy
IT policy may have different interpretations, however, in simpler words, IT policy is defined as the management of communication and storage work.
23. Define service portfolio, service catalogue and service pipelines
It is not uncommon to get asked definitions in between the ITIL interview questions, therefore, to keep you prepared, here are the definitions
Service portfolio- a repository of all the information that is related to IT services in the organization
Service catalogue- contains the links of action services with the help of the service design packages.
Service pipeline- contains references of the services that have not been lived yet. These are generally plans which have been proposed or under development.
24. What is the warranty?
Warranty refers to the assurance provided by the service provider to its customers or stakeholders.
It generally refers to the agreement that states the services provided will meet the expectations of requirements.
In short, warranty focuses on availability, capacity, security, and continual ensured working of the service.
25. Define an IT asset?
IT asset is defined as any component that proves financially valuable for delivering an IT product or service.
26. What is a utility?
A utility is referred to the functionality of a product or service to meet a particular need in the market.
27. How can one differentiate between incidents, problems and known errors?
Incidents refer to instances that were not expected during the planning process and are not supposed to be part of the operation.
Problems are caused due to incidents and conflicts which are still unknown
Known errors are problems that have already been diagnosed and a permanent solution has already been found for it.
28. Who decides the categorization of the proposed change within the ITIL change management process?
The Change Master plays the role. They play a key role by ensuring the projects meet the required objectives within the given timeline and budget.
29. What happens after a change has been implemented?
After a change has been implemented, an evaluation is performed, known as the Post-Implementation Review (PIR). This helps in providing a complete assessment and review of the working solution. In addition, it helps in gauging the effectiveness of change implemented.
30. What is the freeze period?
The freeze period is defined as a time in the developmental process after which the rules for bringing in changes become stricter. It also refers to the period in which the rules are applied.
31. What is CSF?
CSF is an acronym that stands for Critical Success Factor. It refers to an element that is mandatory for the achievement of a given task.
CSF is also defined as the factor that helps drive a company forward and helps meet the goals of a business.
32. Which are the factors that can lead to data leakage?
Data leakage refers to unauthorized data transmission either physically or electronically from an organization to an external recipient.
The factors that usually lead to data leakage are corrupt hardware, malware, misuse, human error, data theft, or system misconfiguration.
33. What are the different types of XSS attacks?
Non-persistent XSS attack (data injected by attacker gets reflected in response and has a link with the XSS vector)
Persistent XSS attack (script gets automatically executed the moment a user opens an affected page)
Document object model based XSS attack (an attack which is caused when a web application writes data to the document-based model without any sanitization)
34. Why is the policy of information security important?
Information security policy is significant as it helps in underlying the importance of responsibilities of the employees about the security and safety of information, data, and intellectual property from the potential risks.
35. Name some of the popular work-around recovery options?
Work-around recovery options that are popular are
Reciprocal arrangements
Fast recovery
Gradual recovery
Manual workaround
Immediate recovery
Intermediate recovery
36. What is meant by the RACI model?
Interviewers, take note, cause this is one of the most popular ITIL interview questions.
RACI models help in identifying responsibilities and roles in a project.
RACI stands for
Responsible
Accountable
Consulted
Informed
37. Differentiate between reactive and proactive problem management?
Reactive problem management helps in identifying and eliminating the root cause of an incident.
On the other hand, proactive problem management prevents incidents by finding the potential errors in the infrastructure.
38. Name some ITIL models commonly adopted by organizations
Three types of models that organizations generally adopt are:-
IBM (IT process model)
Microsoft MOF (Microsoft operations framework)
Hewlett-Packard (HP ITSM reference model)
39. What do ITSCM and BCP stand for?
ITSCM- IT Service Continuity Management (a practice that helps in allowing information security professionals to develop recovery plans for IT infrastructure)
BCP- Business Continuity Planning (it is a process that helps in creating prevention and recovery plans from potential threats)
40. What is the importance of a Service Value System?
Service Value System helps identify how the different components of an organization work together to create value.
SVS consist of input, elements and outputs.
The main inputs being opportunities and demand, whereas the output is determined by the value delivered by the services and products.
Conclusion :
Now there you go. Hopefully, our list of some of the most frequently asked ITIL interview questions could come to your aid.
To ace these DataStage interview questions, one should have a thorough knowledge of ITIL.
ITIL is a globally recognized framework and has become one of the most sought-after jobs nowadays. Also, not to mention the lucrative salary that comes with the position.
Companies have been hiring IT professionals to boost the growth of their businesses and it is likely you will be facing cut-throat competition for your position.
Different companies have different methods for interviewing, however, this article will help in getting all the frequently asked ITIL interview questions in a grasp.
Creating a good first impression is essential too. The first impression has a lasting effect. So the moment you step inside the office, act like you want the job.
Do not show up late or wear any shabby clothes. Make sure to do your homework. Do thorough research on the company, be confident and you are sure to ace your part.
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