ITIL 4 Practices: Purpose and Key Terms Practice Questions

Purpose and Key Terms of 15 ITIL Practices on the ITIL 4 Foundation exam

Learning outcome 6 of the ITIL 4 Foundation syllabus, the purpose and key terms of 15 ITIL practices, is 7 of the 40 marks (17.5%). Questions give a purpose and ask which practice it belongs to, or give a definition and ask for the term. Seven of the fifteen practices come back in detail in learning outcome 7.

Share of the exam

7 of the 40 marks in the official syllabus (17.5%)

Our drill

10 questions from 62 15 Practices questions, untimed, an explanation after every answer; one free attempt, unlimited with a pass

Study notes

• Information security management protects the information the organization needs, managing risks to its confidentiality, integrity and availability (and to authentication and non-repudiation).
• Relationship management builds and maintains links between the organization and its stakeholders at strategic and tactical levels. Supplier management makes sure suppliers and their performance are managed so products and services are delivered smoothly.
• IT asset management plans and manages the whole lifecycle of IT assets to get the most value, control costs, manage risks and support decisions. Service configuration management keeps accurate, reliable information about the configuration of services and the CIs that support them available where and when it is needed.
• Monitoring and event management observes services and components and records and reports selected changes of state (events), deciding on the right response. Release management makes new and changed services and features available for use. Deployment management moves new or changed components into live (and other) environments.
• Continual improvement keeps practices and services aligned with changing business needs. Change enablement maximizes successful changes by assessing risk, authorizing changes and managing the change schedule.
• Incident management minimizes the negative impact of incidents by restoring normal service as quickly as possible. Problem management reduces the likelihood and impact of incidents by finding their causes and managing workarounds and known errors.
• Service request management handles all predefined, user-initiated service requests effectively and in a user-friendly way. The service desk captures demand for incident resolution and service requests and is the entry point and single point of contact for users. Service level management sets business-based targets for service levels and checks delivery against them.
• Key terms: an IT asset is any financially valuable component that can contribute to an IT product or service; an event is a change of state that matters for managing a service or CI; a configuration item is any component that must be managed to deliver an IT service; a change adds, modifies or removes anything that could affect services; an incident is an unplanned interruption or reduction in quality of a service; a problem is a cause or potential cause of incidents; a known error is a problem that has been analyzed but not resolved.

What 15 practices questions test

• Recall the purpose of 15 practices (syllabus 6.1)
• Recall the definitions of IT asset, event, configuration item, change, incident, problem and known error (6.2)

How to study it

• Make a card for each practice with its purpose in one line, and quiz yourself both ways: purpose to practice and practice to purpose.
• Separate the look-alikes: release (making features available) against deployment (moving components), IT asset management (value and cost over the lifecycle) against service configuration management (configuration information and relationships), relationship management (stakeholders) against supplier management (suppliers).
• Take the 15 practices drill until you score 90% or better; these are recall marks.

Common questions

The other ITIL 4 Foundation learning outcomes

• Key Concepts of Service Management
• The ITIL Guiding Principles
• The Four Dimensions of Service Management
• The ITIL Service Value System
• The Service Value Chain
• Seven ITIL Practices in Detail
• ITIL 4 Foundation practice exam (40 questions, 60 minutes)
• Mixed drill: all seven learning outcomes

Sources

• PeopleCert: ITIL 4 Foundation (exam format, pass mark, languages, bundles, renewal)
• PeopleCert: ITIL 4 Foundation Syllabus, version 4.2.0, March 2025 (learning outcomes, marks, question styles; copy published by GogoTraining)
• PeopleCert: ITIL FAQ (ITIL Version 5, planned sunset of ITIL 4 modules, renewal routes)
• PeopleCert: ITIL Foundation (Version 5)
• PeopleCert: online exam guidelines (web-based exam driver)