As part of continual service improvement activities, the following changes have been made to Change Management related email communications. All email notifications regarding the progress of change requests now automatically include the affected system or service in the short description. This means there is no longer a requirement to include the name of the affected […]
improvements
2018
A new way to log Telephony Requests
In the last 12 months, Service Desk processed 99,687 call records, of which approximately 28% were ‘First time Fulfilment’. Approximately 7% were junk emails, and 7% were updates or chases to existing cases. This means that 58% of incoming call requests were logged as Incidents or Requests. In many cases, Service Desk are logging the […]
Service Management Team looking into every incident that is about to breach its SLA.
In May, the Service Management Team will be focussing on a single activity – looking into every incident that is about to breach its SLA.  There are six key reasons for us not being able to meet our standard five day SLA: Poor ticket management Issue is not an Incident (request or project) Lack […]
2017
Change Management – Minor Amendments
Currently when a change approval request is set to More Information Required the change requestor/assignee is not automatically notified of this. This change addresses that fact by sending a notification email to the requestor/assignee that more information is required. In addition currently changes can be closed as Closed Cancelled, Closed Backed out or Closed Failed […]
Customer Personas @iSolutions
With an increasing focus on the student experience within the UoS and the drive for a more customer centric approach within iSolutions, the need to identify, understand and manage our customers is becoming increasingly important in order to develop and deliver exceptional customer experiences. A project team has been assembled to research, develop and deliver […]
ServiceNow – Enhancements to Report Exports
Following feedback from users who find the 10,000 row export limit on ServiceNow generated reports to be too confining – particularly when exporting data for busy months, we have implemented a rule to increase the number of exportable rows from 10,000 to 20,000. If you notice any performance degradation as a result of exporting more […]
2016
Improvements to Staff Desktop Services reporting
As part of our ongoing project to improve incident categorisation and reporting, we first piloted using CMDB CI records instead of the arbitrary CSI list to categorise incidents. Following the success of this, and to allow for more granular reporting, we have introduced Service-specific ‘Action Codes’ to use when closing incidents to describe the nature […]
Incident Service Categorisation Changes
**The below changes primarily affect iSolutions though other tenants may be impacted if they interact with Incidents where the Logged For is set to IT** The requirements for ticket logging have been changed such that for tickets where the Logged For is IT: Category, Subcategory and Item will become non-mandatory – They will still be visible […]
2015
New Team Names within ServiceNow
We have completed a review of Assignment Groups within ServiceNow and have implemented a new list of team names (for iSolutions only). Many of the team names were inherited from the initial import from the old ESS system and much has changed since then. The new team names reflect more closely the way in which […]
Portal & Call Improvements
A new set of changes have been promoted in ServiceNow that address a number of small issues and feature requests made by customers over the last few months, specifically around the customer portal and the Call function. Â These include: When Calls are converted into Incidents there are now rules that will auto assign to Service […]
Mailbox Quota Information
In an attempt to improve the process used when granting mailbox increases (a very high volume request), exchange quota information for individual and generic accounts has now been linked into ServiceNow. Â This allows Service Desk and IRT to see how big someone’s mailbox is and how much of their quota is being used at a […]
Miscellaneous Fixes & Improvements – Short Description Spell Check & Group Management
An update has been promoted into ServiceNow that addresses a number of small issues or feature requests, including: Short Description now has spell check enabled, the same as the Description field. Short Description is now visible again on the portal view of tickets (had been hidden in error in a previous change). Contact Type […]
Resolution Improvements
A series of improvements have been made that target the resolution process on Incidents.  This should make resolving tickets quicker and more efficient, and the data more accurate. “Closure Information” only appears when the ticket has been set to Resolved (this declutters some of the form when the ticket is active). Upon Resolution it also becomes […]
Inbound Actions
A major update has been implemented that addresses the behaviour of emails when they arrive in ServiceNow. Â This addresses some of the undesired behaviour (e.g. FWD: emails) and is intended to improve some behaviour to reduce the overheads on teams by targeting things such as ticket duplications. Below is a summary of these changes, including […]
SLA Changes
Since go-live SLAs on tickets have exhibited undesirable behaviour, leading to difficulties when reporting.  All SLAs were showing as Completed whether or not they still met the criteria for the SLA, making it difficult to distinguish between the current active SLA and previous ones that no longer applied. A fix has gone in that sets […]
User Records & Flyout Windows
Previously, when looking at a user’s record in ServiceNow, it presented a large number of unused or unnecessary fields. The form has been tidied up to present only useful information relating to account, role, location and contact details. The flyout window when hovering over the “i” next to any User field also used to […]
Application Menu Changes
The Application Menu on the left side of the interface has been tidied up and adjusted to make menu items clearer and more useful. A self-service application has been added that replicates some functionality of the customer portal, allowing all users to see their own tickets in the main interface. It also includes a link […]
Miscellaneous Improvements
The default tab title has been changed to “UoS ServiceNow”. Additionally, when viewing an individual record (e.g. Incident, Change etc) it displays the record number and short description. This helps differentiate between different windows for those who work with multiple tabs open. The favicon has also been changed to the University standard. To help differentiate […]