ITIL 4 Foundation Complete Review Guide 2026–2027

4. Normal change: must be scheduled, assessed and authorized following a process; the change authority depends on the type of change (5.2.4).
5. Emergency change: must be implemented as soon as possible, for example to resolve an incident or apply a security patch; assessment and authorization are expedited and a separate change authority may be used (5.2.4).
6. Change authority: the person or group who authorizes a change. The change schedule is used to plan changes, help communication, avoid conflicts and assign resources (5.2.4).
7. Incidents are prioritized based on an agreed classification, so that those with the highest business impact are resolved first (5.2.5).
8. Incidents may be resolved by users through self-help, by the service desk, by support teams or suppliers; complex incidents may need temporary teams or swarming (5.2.5).
9. Problem identification includes trend analysis of incident records, detecting duplicate and recurring issues, and using information from suppliers, partners and development teams (5.2.8).
10. Problem control includes problem analysis and documenting workarounds and known errors; problems are prioritized by the risk they pose (5.2.8).
11. Error control manages known errors: it identifies potential permanent solutions, which may lead to a change request, and regularly re-assesses known errors that are not resolved (5.2.8).
12. Workaround: a solution that reduces or eliminates the impact of an incident or problem for which a full resolution is not yet available (5.2.8).
13. Service request: a request from a user or a user's authorized representative that initiates a service action which has been agreed as a normal part of service delivery (5.2.16).
14. Service requests should be standardized and automated as far as possible, with policies on which requests need little or no extra approval and clear expectations for fulfilment times (5.2.16).
15. The service desk gives users a clear path to report issues, queries and requests and have them acknowledged, classified, owned and actioned; it can be physical or virtual (5.2.14).
16. Service desk channels include phone, service portals and mobile apps, live chat and chatbots, email, walk-in, text and social media, and discussion forums (5.2.14).
17. Service level agreement (SLA): a documented agreement between a service provider and a customer that identifies both the services required and the expected level of service (5.2.15).
18. Service level management gathers information from customer engagement, customer feedback, operational metrics and business metrics (5.2.15.1).

Common mistakes in this chapter

• ✕ Where are we now? is the baseline assessment. Defining measurable targets belongs to Where do we want to be?
• ✕ Standard changes are pre-authorized because their risk was assessed when the procedure was created, not because they never carry risk.
• ✕ Emergency changes still need assessment and authorization; it is expedited, not skipped.
• ✕ Incident management restores service; finding the root cause belongs to problem management. A workaround can come from either.
• ✕ A service request is not an incident. A password reset or a new laptop is a request; something broken or degraded is an incident.
• ✕ Compliments, complaints and feedback can be handled as service requests.
• ✕ Green SLA metrics with unhappy customers is the watermelon effect; the fix is to measure what matters to the customer, not to add more technical metrics.
• ✕ Continual improvement is everyone's responsibility, even when a small dedicated team leads it.