I

had a great time presenting on Advanced Incident Management last week at Knowledge11. During that session I demonstrated a lot of very useful functionality that I’ve used and created to improve the standard incident management setup for technicians working in ServiceNow. Since most of my presentation was a demo, I promised the attendees that I would post information about the solutions we talked about there. Read on if you want to see some great ideas to improve incident management in your organization!

Incident Form

I know some of this is a pretty rough draft. If you’re interested in more detail on any of these topics, please comment below and I’ll write a post to address it.
If you’re interested in seeing the slides from this presentation (or any other session at Knowledge11) you can access them through the ServiceNow community site. Here’s a link!

Overall Goals:

  • Keep it simple!
  • Leverage existing data
  • Smart & intuitive design
  • Get out of the code
  • Automate and simplify repeated tasks

…all with the purpose of speeding time to resolution and improving customer satisfaction!

-Keep it simple!

-Advanced != Complex. Don’t overload your incident form with low-use garbage!
-Base incident form (screenshot above). All information is relevant and useful

-Leverage existing data

-CMDB
Consolidate your ‘Configuration item’ field and ‘Affected CIs’ lists to get a better picture of what’s actually being impacted in your environment.
-Configuration item field macro icons
-BSM Map: relationships, map action icon showing only CI field tasks
Use of ‘Affected CIs’ list with BSM map action icons
-Change calendar (FSC): Don’t forget that change information can be a valuable input into incident resolution.
On-call schedule popup
Custom knowledge search

-Get out of the code

-Lookup tables are a great way to separate code from data and keep yourself out of the code where possible
Priority lookup
Assignment lookup

-Smart & intuitive design

Priority 1 incident scroller
Outlook-style module counts
-Color change on comments field (Field styles)
Simultaneous task update alert
Create user without leaving the form
Knowledge search from homepage

-Automate & simplify repeated tasks & actions

-Templates (Advanced Templates)
Suggestion fields
QuickForm from list