IPA FE Subject A sample Question 45
A question IPA Japan published in 基本情報技術者試験 科目A サンプル問題 問45, translated into English. ITPEC is based on the same exams.
Same question on ITPEC: Nov 2021 Q55
Which of the following corresponds to benchmarking in process improvement of service management?
Explanation
Evaluating service quality and performance against best practices inside and outside the industry — that comparison is what benchmarking means.
Benchmarking measures one's own processes and results against a reference, the best performers in the same industry or in others, to find the gap and learn the practices that close it. In service management it feeds continual improvement, for example by comparing incident resolution times or availability with leading providers.
Answer (d)
Why not others:
- •(a) — measuring availability, reliability and performance and reporting them to customers is service level reporting under service level management.
- •(b) — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are the four elements of SWOT analysis.
- •(c) — finance, customers, internal processes, and learning and growth are the four perspectives of the balanced scorecard.
Key rule: Recognize a management technique by its signature: comparison with best practice is benchmarking, four perspectives is the balanced scorecard, strengths to threats is SWOT, and measuring against agreed targets is SLA reporting.
Service Management · AI-written, may contain errors
This question comes from the past questions IPA Japan publishes, translated into English by ITPEC Practice. ITPEC Practice is an independent study tool and is not affiliated with IPA or ITPEC. See the original paper (PDF) or Report an issue.