ITIL 4 · apply · about 10 minutes

One queue, four kinds of work

A 12-person platform team runs a single ticket queue. Last month it held: 41 "system slow" reports that stopped after a nightly restart, 60 access requests, 9 emergency patches, and a long-running ticket titled "investigate memory growth" that has been reassigned six times. Availability reporting says 99.2%. The team lead says everything is on fire and the metrics look fine.

Reorganise the queue. Say what goes where, and what the team will see that it cannot see today.

Write your answer somewhere else — on paper, in a mail draft, out loud to someone. Then come back and mark it against the rubric. The rubric is disputable: if you think a line is wrong for your situation, you are probably right, and noticing that is worth more than the tick.

Mark it against the rubric

Splits the 41 slowdowns (incidents, closed by a workaround) from one open problem Incident and problem are different objects
Moves the 60 access requests out of the incident queue entirely A request is not a small incident
Routes the 9 patches as emergency changes with their own authority, not as incidents Three types of change
Points at the access requests as the automation candidate — but optimises the steps first Optimise and automate — in that order
Explains why 99.2% and "everything is on fire" are both true: output measured, value not Value is co-created
Proposes a first small change with a measurement, not a full redesign Progress iteratively with feedback

Sources: ITIL 4 Foundation (AXELOS / PeopleCert), 2019 edition, ITIL 4 glossary of terms. Written from those texts and last checked on 2026-10-16 against reporting on them — not read line by line against the primary documents. Every card names the clause it comes from precisely so you can settle it at the source, and [email protected] is where a correction goes.

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