HVIT Sample Test 2 difficult questions Flashcards
An organization wants to adopt a human-centered, holistic, and co-creational approach to service design.
Which represents the co-creational aspect of this approach?
A. Considering all elements of a service design when changing individual elements
B. Involving all relevant stakeholders, both internal and external, in the design process
C. Using service design models to orchestrate design activities and resources
D. Empathizing with stakeholders and considering users’ emotions when designing services
B. Correct. “‘Co-created value’ refers to the value for the service consumer, service provider, and other stakeholders.” “The purpose of the service design practice is to design products and services that are fit for purpose and use, and that can be delivered by the organization and its ecosystem.”
An organization has experienced service interruption after large deployments and releases. It wants to reduce both the size of the deployments and the variation in the types of deployments.
Which technique for fast development would achieve this?
A. Infrastructure as code
B. Loosely coupled information system architecture
C. Blameless post-mortems
D. Kanban
B. Correct. Loosely coupled information system architecture enables the separate development, testing and deployment of service components “by breaking a system down into parts that can be developed and managed relatively independently”.
Which term describes a system that is unpredictable, so that learning from experimentation is more appropriate than following rigid processes?
A. Obvious
B. Complicated
C. Complex
D. Disorder
C. Correct. “The inherent unpredictability of these systems presents a challenge to people who are used to working with predetermined processes”. “Complex: Unclear and unknowable causality requiring safe-to-fail experimentation (emergent practice).”
Which is an example of a digital organization?
A. An organization which uses IT to change its strategic direction
B. An organization which uses IT to support its operational processes
C. An organization which uses IT to improve its ‘service desk’ practice
D. An organization which has undergone an IT transformation
A. Correct. “Digital organizations are enabled by digital technology. Digital technology is a significant underpinning enabler for these organizations’ internal processes, and is often part of their products and services.”
An organization is planning to make improvements to a complex service, to improve performance and reliability. They have analysed the current situation, and they know what they want to achieve.
What approach should they take for the ‘how do we get there?’ step of the improvement?
A. Create a plan based on a detailed gap analysis and follow the steps of the plan
B. Define metrics for the desired future state and continually measure these
C. Define a minimum viable product and improve it incrementally
D. Establish hypotheses and perform safe to fail experiments
D. Correct. “Experiment towards the next target condition: come up with ideas to overcome an obstacle and run experiments with that idea. If possible, test only one hypothesis at a time.”
An organization has many different portfolios (product, programme, project, application) that are managed with varying degrees of formality. The organization wants to ensure appropriate use of its resources across these portfolios. It also wants to obtain more accurate data on how the items in these portfolios are performing.
Which approach would BEST enable the organization to accomplish these objectives?
A. Ensure each portfolio has a documented charter and an owner who prioritizes the portfolio regularly
B. Develop a health check template that can be used to compare the value realization of all portfolio items
C. Establish a policy that portfolio items deemed important by stakeholders are given adequate resources
D. Establish criteria that can be used to review the value propositions and financial health of new initiatives
B. Correct. This option provides a consistent way of comparing all portfolio items and will provide information that can then be used to make sound investment decisions. A health check template “will allow comparison across portfolio items by requiring key information reports that indicate all the value realization indicators that are valid for the organization (for example, the fiscal and technical health, return on investment, level of strategic alignment, size of customer base, risks or technical debt, etc.).”
How should a product team make use of a 0.1% error budget?
A. 0.1 per cent of funding should be used for remediation of defects
B. If downtime approaches 0.1 per cent then more effort should be spent on improving stability
C. 0.1 per cent of coding time should be spent developing error handling routines
D. If errors approach 0.1 per cent of user messages then more time should be spent on reducing errors
B. Correct. “An error budget is a control mechanism that allocates appropriate capacity to development work for stability, ensuring the right balance. When a service is close to its error budget, the product team should focus on improvements rather than new features” and “an error budget is expressed as 100 per cent minus the service level objective (SLO) of the service. A 99.9 per cent SLO service has a 0.1 per cent error budget.”
An organization has set up a new team to develop a mobile app. They want this team to help start their digital transformation journey.
Who should analyse and document requirements for the new app?
A. The existing business analysis team should do this work
B. A new digital business analysis team should be created to do this work
C. The product owner for the new mobile app should do this work
D. Software developers should iteratively define the needs as business analysis is not needed for this work
C. Correct. “In the agile context, the business analysis practice is associated less with a specific team or role, but is increasingly applied by multi-skilled practitioners performing roles such as product or service owner.”
Which is an example of how the ‘information security management’ practice contributes to achieving assured conformance?
A. Ensuring that any developed code is checked for information security flaws by a colleague
B. Responding to major incidents by reviewing alert thresholds for critical service components
C. Creating standard build models, which incorporate information security controls, for service components
D. Developing a policy to address a third party’s access to the organization’s virtual private network (VPN)
D. Correct. “Information security management policies and plans may address the following aspects: …remote access; suppliers’ access to an organization’s information and resources”. This helps to achieve assured conformance by restricting access to the organization’s resources to those who have authorization.
A digitally-enabled organization is introducing the discipline of chaos engineering in an effort to test and improve the resilience of its IT systems.
In this context, which would NOT be a contribution of the ‘service continuity management’ practice?
A. Introducing controls to ensure failsafe systems
B. Considering the risks and designing countermeasures
C. Conducting exercises to test plans and increase readiness
D. Continually monitoring plans and countermeasures
A. Correct. This would NOT be a contribution. “Failsafe systems are an illusion; organizations must be prepared for inevitable and unexpected failure. The emphasis is no longer on maintaining a long interval between failures; it is on restoring service quickly when inevitable issues do occur.”
An organization used to have a product owner who frequently made decisions without involving stakeholders and who was not open to feedback. As a result, users are dissatisfied, the development team is unhappy, and the value of the product is diminished. A new product owner has been assigned to replace the previous product owner.
How can the ‘relationship management’ practice BEST contribute to helping the new product owner quickly regain the trust of stakeholders and maximize the value of the product?
A. Adopt a common set of values and principles that can be shared by everyone in the organization
B. Provide techniques that can be used to establish customers’ priorities and address complaints
C. Ensure that the right investment decisions are being made and that resources are allocated appropriately
D. Improve the approach the team is using to develop the product based on the organization’s requirements
B. Correct. This is a contribution of the ‘relationship management’ practice. Addressing complaints would ensure that dissatisfied users and the unhappy team are being heard. Establishing customers’ priorities would lead to maximizing the value of the product. Relationship management – “Involvement in establishing customers’ priorities for new or changed products and services.” “Involvement in addressing complaints and mediating conflicting requirements”. “The relationship management practice includes techniques and tools that help to understand the stakeholders’ interests and ensure that their needs and expectations are managed and met.”
Which concept is concerned with creating prototypes to test hypotheses?
A. Design thinking
B. Safety culture
C. Continual improvement
D. Complexity thinking
A. Correct. A typical behaviour pattern of ‘design thinking’ is to “create hypotheses based on observation and reflection, and test them with prototypes.”
An organization has recently experienced service outages. The organization has complained to their service provider that the outages were not resolved in a way which would have most benefited the organization.
Which is an example of how the ‘availability management’ practice could contribute to preventing such a situation in the future?
A. Increasing the MTBF targets with the aim of eliminating all possible outages, in conjunction with service continuity activities
B. Understanding the services from the consumers’ perspectives and altering the MTRS targets accordingly
C. Reviewing the targets related to service performance to ensure that the expected demand can be fulfilled
D. Understanding which applications are most critical to the organization’s services and designing them with more resilience
B. Correct. When the service provider understands how its services are used, the targets and metrics can be created or adjusted in line with consumer expectations. “MTRS measures how quickly service is restored after a failure” and “availability is the most crucial service quality indicator because service customers typically lose money because of service outages. Availability metrics and targets should accurately reflect how consumers are impacted by service unavailability”
The IT Teams of an organization manage events affecting infrastructure and software components by taking action when thresholds are exceeded. Sometimes the first time the organization learns about a major incident is when a user contacts the service desk.
Which is the BEST improvement action to take?
A. Create automated workarounds for incidents relating to entire services
B. Create fast incident escalation routes to the appropriate resolving groups
C. Revise the service continuity plan for the services most frequently affected
D. Change the design of the monitoring tools to include service events
D. Correct. The organization should monitor end-to-end services as well as service components. “When establishing or improving the monitoring and event management practice, the following aspects should be considered: identifying and prioritizing services and service components monitored”.
A commercial service provider organization uses multiple approaches to software development. Several of its largest customers have communicated their requirements and priorities and have suggested they might leave if those requirements are not met in the near future. In some cases, the requirements are unclear and conflicting.
Which software development approach would BEST enable this organization to meet the needs of its largest customers?
A. A waterfall approach as the requirements, priorities, and required resources are known
B. An iterative approach that enables small teams to work independently
C. An agile approach that enables fast feedback and the ability to develop the highest priority items first
D. A parallel experimentation approach that includes prototyping so that unarticulated requirements are captured
C. Correct. This approach uses fast feedback to address the unclear requirements and emphasizes the need to work on the highest priority items first. “Agile and Scrum approaches are a combination of incremental and iterative, focusing on close collaboration with the owner of the application in order to obtain fast feedback and achieve quick development of small increments from which the owner can derive value.”
