Following some customer feedback after the Helsinki update, we’ve made a few changes to the user interface of the Activity Stream on tickets to make text more readable and to better highlight the difference between Public Notes, Private Notes, and system and field changes. Rather than light grey, text in the Activity Stream will […]
2017
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 […]
Incident Management State Changes
iSolutions Service Management, with help from Applications Management, have been working to streamline and consolidate the list of Incident States in ServiceNow both for ease of use and to reduce maintenance overhead and bugs. The full details of the new state list are as follows: New – Only applicable to an Incident that is currently […]
Waiting for Info
The auto-prompting process that has been added to the Awaiting User Info State for Incidents has been running for a few weeks now and it seems to be working as intended. However, there appears to be a little confusion about what action automatically causes the State to revert to In Progress. For tickets that have […]
2016
Additional Approvers for certain Standard Change Requests – iSolutions only
In order to ensure the approval requirements laid down in the following standard change template documents are enforced, additional approval fields have been made mandatory. STD157 – Server decommissioning – Service Owner now mandatory in addition to Peer Approver and should be the Service Owner of the system or service supported by the server being […]
Fantastic incidents and where to find them
How long is it acceptable to keep an incident ticket open? If the aim of incident management is to restore disrupted service as soon as possible, we might reasonably expect most incidents to be fixed within a day or two. However, there are always a few incidents that resist resolution but generally those incidents should […]
New SLA dashboard
Several months ago we implemented a new set of dashboards so that we could see at various levels what the workload of the department and individuals was. Previously we had a number of issues with SLA’s so were unable to report on them within ServiceNow so have used Qlikview as an alternative reporting solution. These […]
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 […]
Multiple Minor Improvements
A number of small changes have been implemented in ServiceNow to target minor improvements: Group managers were able to add people to their teams but not remove them. This has now been fixed. A BRM field has been added to Department records where the department is a Faculty or top tier Professional Service.  This will eventually […]
iSolutions Customer Survey Improvements
The iSolutions Customer Survey was previously held in iSurvey which is not a centrally supported service. Therefore the decision was made to move Surveys into ServiceNow. It was also hard to see the relationship between tickets and their responses in iSurvey. Â This has now been completed for Incidents and the results are reviewed fortnightly by […]
Change Module Improvements
The following recent enhnacements to the user experience have been made. All change related emails generated by ServiceNow are more easily identifiable as they are now from Change Management rather than ServiceLine or Support. When an Approver reassigns their approval, the assignee now receieves an approvals request notification email. The ability now exists to create […]
Improved Matching on Email Addresses
ServiceNow is set by default to look at someone’s primary email address when the email the system to match it against their user record – for example emails from n.hynes@soton.ac.uk automatically get matched against my Nick Hynes ServiceNow record. Unfortunately, some people have their email clients set up to use an alternate address to the standard […]
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 […]
Change Calendar Enhancements
In order to improve the clarity of information shown in the ServiceNow Change Calendar(Forward Schedule of Change) some adjustments have been made to the colours used to identify change restriction periods and change types. Normal changes are now shown in dark green with Minor Normal changes in light green. The colours of yellow for Standard […]
Incident Management Improvements
Many of you will no doubt have noticed the changes we’ve made to the way incidents are categorised and managed. Working in conjunction with the Service Desk and Ed Finn, we’ve been working on implementing a Service-based system that logs Incidents against the Service entry in the CMDB. This means that Service Owners and other […]
Applying Standard Change Templates in Geneva
The method for applying a pre-configured STDXXX Template to a Standard Change Request form has changed in the new ServiceNow Geneva interface as follows:- • Open a new Standard Change form as normal. • If the Templates bar is not showing at the bottom of the screen click on the More Options ellipsis (ooo) next […]
Service Restart Notices and At Risk Calendar Enhancements – Isolutions Staff Only
As part of our continual service improvement of the ServiceNow platform the following enhancements have been made:- The ability of iSolutions staff to create Service Restart & Outage notices direct from the Incident, Problem or Change Request record as well as directly in the Outages form has been enabled. A calendar view of all the […]
Service Restart Notification
In order to take advantage of features available in ServiceNow we recently changed the way in which Service Restarts, both planned and unplanned, are reported. Previously a Service Restart email template was completed and then emailed to the iSolutions-change-notify mailing list from which the Outages form in ServiceNow was completed by Service Management. With the […]
Delegate Interface Improvements
The Delegate interface in ServiceNow wasn’t satisfactory with no required fields, meaning people could submit blank delegations, a confused layout without clarity on what fields meant and some fields being visible that are not in use. We’ve now reordered the form to make the layout more intuitive, set some fields as mandatory, removed unused fields […]
Application List Clean-Up
The list of available applications in the left-hand menu has been cleaned up and reordered to make it easier to find and access the top used areas. For example, applications not in use by certain tenants (e.g. Change, Configuration etc) have been hidden for them and applications such as Dashboards and Reports have been moved […]