As part of our process of Continual Service Improvement, work has taken place to redesign the Problem module in ServiceNow and a summary of the work carried out as part of the redesign is as follows:-
The majority of the work involved the tidying up of the problem record form to remove unnecessary fields and rearrange some of the fields to improve the displaying of information.   Changes were also made to improve how the progress of a problem’s investigation is recorded either in the main notes section or via tasks.
In addition to changes to the Problem Module the Problem Management process was revised to improve the monitoring of the progress of problems.
These primarily are:-
- The requirement that the problem record must be assigned to an individual within 7 days of opening the problem record.
- The introduction of an Under Investigation state which the problem record changes to once the problem has been assigned to an individual to investigate the root cause of the problem.
- All problem records under investigation must be updated with the progress or otherwise at least every 30 days.
- A workaround must be documented before a problem record can be saved as a Known Error.
- As an aid to team managers on the progress of their teams’ problems, the following reports have been created and will be automatically generated
- Weekly – Team’s problem records that are in still in an Open state and unassigned 7 days after creation.
- Monthly – Team’s problem records with an Under Investigation state that have not been updated for at least 30 days.
Links to the Problem Management Policy, User Guide and Training pack have been added to the User Documents section of the Problem module in ServiceNow.