IT Service Management

The latest post-Golive update was released on Wednesday, August 8.  

Please find the Release highlights below, as well as information on the Ticket Management process, Process Tips and Best Practices, and upcoming Training sessions.

Highlights of August 8 Release 

Below are just a few of the issues addressed; for full release notes, please see the ITSM Release Notes article in ServiceNow.

• Updating the Configuration Item field of the Incident form will sometimes update the Affected Service. You will now receive a warning if you enter a CI that changes the Affected Service field value.
• New manually created request catalog tasks will now start in an Open state automatically. You don’t need to change the state when you’re assigning a new task to another group. This is consistent with Incident tasks.
• There will now be an Acknowledge button on manually created catalog and Incident tasks that have been assigned to a group. Similar to RITM and INC records, pressing the Acknowledge button will put the task into an In Progress state and populate the Assigned to field.
• For new RITMs created after this release, the catalog task that gets automatically created when you acknowledge an RITM will automatically start in the In Progress state. You don’t have to set the state manually.
• A database view has been created to enable easier access and reporting of CI Contact information. The view visually reformats the contact information into a structure similar to what was available in ITSM 1.0.
• Category and Subcategory  fields are now mandatory. They have been updated within the Incident form to allow for more granular data analysis.
• Everyone with a ServiceNow licence will now receive ALL Incident and Change Alerts by default. To opt out of some of these notifications, please see this Knowledge Base article: Disabling/re-enabling notification emails from ServiceNow.

Ticket Management Process 

 L2 and L3 Resolvers and Fulfillers are receiving more Tickets than originally anticipated. For instructions on handling Tickets, please refer to the Knowledge Base article on Ticket Management and follow the steps starting from “Select the Call Type”.

Process tips and best practices 

Responses to email notifications from ITSM are sent to customer

Please be aware that if you respond directly via email to an ITSM notification, the system will treat your response as an “Additional Comment” and send your reply to the Customer. To ensure comments are properly documented and reach their intended audience, you must log in to ITSM to respond to notifications; do not respond directly to ITSM notifications via email.

MDS (Minimal Dataset)

For Request Fulfillment, we’ll be handing MDS differently from Incident by creating complete catalog items with all the required fields. The catalog item creation will be implemented over two phases:

• Phase 2.1: for a limited set of internal IT requests
• Phase 2.2: for use in a customer portal

In the meantime, please provide the Service Desk with the MDS information for your requests so that they can include it in their internal KB.

Generic requests

You can now change the title of a Generic Request from “Generic Request” to a title of your choice. We recommend that you give your Generic Requests meaningful and consistent titles.

Note: The first email sent to the customer upon request creation will still be titled “Generic Request” because it is automatically generated before you can update it. This email now includes the customer’s original request.

Upcoming training sessions

ITM 322 – Request Fulfillment and Incident Management 

Resolvers and Fulfillers who have not yet attended ITM 322 – Request Fulfillment and Incident Management are strongly encouraged to do so. The following sessions are available:

• September 6 at 13h30
• September 7 at 9h30
• September 14 at 9h30

Sign up for ITM 322 in Minerva.

NEW: ITM 328 –  Dashboards & Reports

Want to learn how to create reports and display information on Incidents and Requests?

If you want to learn about available dashboards and reports, how to customize your own to suit your needs, and try some hands-on examples, this  1-hour session is for you. 2 sessions are available:

• September 4 at 10h
• September 11 at 10h

In preparation for Dashboards & Reports training, please watch these two ServiceNow videos:

• Working with dashboards
• Getting started with reports

Sign up for ITM 328 in Minerva.