Scenario
A travel company specializes in providing complete holiday packages to meet customer requirements. There have been instances over the past year where the business has been unable to process holiday bookings due to failure of the IT services. Sales have been lost and the failure has been raised at board level. The IT director has assured the board that the situation will be rectified.
Most holiday bookings are made either by telephone via the company's call centre or through a dedicated website. Both interface with the same back-end booking-processing service. Apart from the call centre and website, the main business services map onto organizational departments and cover: marketing, finance, business operations and central administration.
After some initial investigation within the IT organization, it is clear that the intermittent failures, which were related to a lack of capacity, have occurred during exceptional peak holiday booking periods. The IT organization is not certain when or if these are going to occur in the future. Some booking periods are predictable, such as those associated with promotional offers. Other patterns are totally unpredictable as they often coincide with bad weather being experienced where customers live.
You have been asked how the activities of demand management, based on ITIL practices, can be used to address this issue.
Refer to Scenario
Which one of the following options is the BEST set of actions required to resolve the issue?

• A. Identify the pattern of customer enquiries for holiday bookings and the resulting volume, frequency and location of staff activity. Document these as PBA.
  Gain an understanding of the different roles that are performed by the call centre staff and how these relate to the PBA for the call centre business processes.
  Use this information to identify any shortfall in capacity and create cost estimates of additional resource required to enable the IT services to meet the PBA.
  Discuss the risks associated with failing to meet demand with the business managers. Reach agreement on how to avoid a repeat of the IT failures caused by demand at busy periods.
• B. Identify the pattern of customer enquiries for holiday bookings and the resulting volume, frequency and location of staff activity. Document these as patterns of business activity (PBA)
  Gain an understanding of the different roles that are performed by staff from all business units and how these relate to the PBA for all business processes.
  Use this information to identify any shortfall in capacity and create cost estimates of additional resource required to enable the IT services to meet the PBA.
  Recommend that, where PBA are very predictable, investment should be made in additional resource.
  Where PBA are unpredictable, the risks associated with railing to meet demand should be discussed with the business managers, and mitigation actions agreed.
• C. Identify and understand the PBA resulting from metrics of all the IT services. Ensure that the volume, frequency and location of service use is taken into account.
  Gain an understanding of how the PBA relate to the use of the IT assets especially the hardware and software that may be the cause of the IT failures.
  Once these activities have been completed, the PBA will be used to plan and implement sufficient capacity to meet all demand at all times.
  Discuss the risks associated with failing to meet demand with capacity management and technical staff. Reach agreement on how to avoid a repeat of the IT failures caused by demand at busy periods.
• D. Immediately implement demand management, document the process and allocate roles and responsibilities.
  The demand manager should initiate an activity to identify and understand user profiles resulting from business use of the IT services. Code the user profiles linking them to the associated business roles.
  Match the user profiles to the IT services and analyze any shortfall in capacity required to meet the business objectives. Create a business case for the additional resource required to exceed the business demand for the IT services to account for unpredictable business activity.
  Work with service portfolio management and financial management to agree on the approval of the investment and initiate the project to acquire all the additional resources.

Scenario
An internet banking organization plans to expand operations outside of its current market. Whilst the exact details have yet to be established, it is clear that the IT organization must expand its service offerings within the current portfolio in order to support this growth. It is equally apparent that external customer needs for banking will vary from market to market and that consequently this will require development of completely new service offerings.
You are the head of service within the IT organization. You helped the organization adopt the ITIL framework some years ago and now have most processes in place. Service owners are allocated for the main IT services. Mature service portfolio, service catalogue and service level management processes are in place.
The expansion requires ownership of a business relationship management process and you are considering the role profile for this post.
Refer to the Scenario.
Which one of the following options provides the BEST overview of the business relationship manager's (BRM) responsibilities which will be key to support the expansion?

• A. The BRM will have primary responsibility for engaging actively with the customers. They should develop a mutual understanding with the customers and have a good working knowledge of their business. The BRM would also work closely with the service owners to understand the profile and usage of the IT services, to help develop the IT services and to create a new service catalogue for the new markets. The BRM will articulate service provider business requirement to the customer to prevent them asking for services that would involve them paying more for the IT service they receive.
• B. The BRM will engage actively with the customers, gain a good insight into their business and plans, and develop a strong working relationship. The BRM will work closely with the customer to understand the value proposition of any new IT services that will be required to support the expansion program. The BRM will liaise with the service level manager and service owners to develop the designs of any new IT services, thereby creating value for both parties. The BRM will ensure customer expectations of new services do not exceed what they have agreed to pay for.
• C. The BRM will engage actively with the customers, gain their trust, and help them develop their business area. This would help both the IT organization and the company become more successful. If the BRM commits time and energy, it should be possible to improve the IT services quickly to meet the needs of the expansion program and therefore achieve the business objectives. The BRM should take responsibility for the services and their development, while the service level manager will take responsibility for customer liaison. The BRM will take ultimate responsibility for ensuring the customer needs are met by the service provider by managing any third parties in the emerging markets.
• D. The BRM will engage actively with the customers, gain a good insight into their business and plans, and develop a strong working relationship. The BRM will identify the business requirements associated with the expansion program especially concentrating on gaining a clear understanding of business outcomes and business drivers. The BRM will liaise with the service portfolio manager to understand how the business outcomes can be supported by IT services, and, where possible, create new services and service offerings for inclusion in the service catalogue. It is key that the BRM understands how changes to the customer environment in different operating markets might affect the delivery of services.