Best Practices for Communicating Service Catalog Updates

[chuckn]

Hi all,

Curious what best practices y'all have followed or come up with regarding communicating updates to your service catalogs? We've had discussions about how best to do that to make people aware of all the new items we release each week. In the past I've used a widget on the portal home page listing new catalog items and kept an on-going change log as a knowledge article.

Thanks!

-Chuck

[Daniel Chamberl]

Chuck,

For context: we recently made our Service Catalog available to our entire enterprise to request IT services  (before it was only used by IT for IT) and are currently working to populate more value-add business-facing items. Our catalog items tend to be a bit more complex with multiple workflows, approvals, etc. 

The process that we use for communicating looks something like this:

A Service Owner (the person who owns an IT process that they want to have added to the Service Catalog) will contact my team via a 'new catalog item request' intake form. We evaluate it to ensure the item is 'fit for purpose' - does it truly belong in ServiceNow - and prioritize for eventual gathering of business requirements/development.

Once an item is developed and ready to go, after Service Owner sign-off, we begin to craft a communication based off of an established template (my organization has a preferred way that broad communications should look/read). Depending on the organizational scope and impact of the catalog item, we may get Sr. Leadership sign off on the communication.  We then send the finished communication to the Service Owner so they can send it to their customers.

This method is beneficial in that it allows the Service Owner remains the point of contact for questions about  the new catalog item, they receive the kudos for improving their offerings, and it keeps them accountable for the both the catalog item user experience and fulfillment.

Hope this was helpful!

Dan

[chuckn]

Thanks for sharing, Dan! Good to hear your service owners are engaged in that process. We've had some mixed engagement in that regard ourselves. We're also cognizant of helping people be aware that a catalog item exists at the time they go to request it versus telling them about it at a time when they don't necessarily need it and therefore don't remember it exists. Have you experienced that issue at all? 

[Steve Vaughan]

Hi Chuck,  

   We moved the creation of our catalog items to the ServiceDesk.  In the backend we have about 12 common workflows or Flows they can attach to the catalog item that runs the given process.  For example, we have a get manager, create task (to the group identified on the cat item) flow.  Another is create a task (again to group on cat item), then send optional task to second team (identified on item).  One is even based on a reusable variable that can route to the approver for the variable.

All of this puts the communication of the new items to the team that directly interacts with the end users.  We have a scheduled report that goes out to the global team making them aware of what has been created in the last week.  This works for us as 60% of our interactions come in through email and the ServicDesk triages if they should create an incident or request something. 

The challenge will always be getting this info out to the end users.  You could apply the same logic to a scheduled report to send a PDF out to them, but that requires them to read it. 

I would suggest putting an announcement in the portal that tells the users about the new items.  You could also create a widget that looks for the recently created items and puts it on the main portal or request items pages.  

[chuckn]

Thanks for sharing, Steve!

Clever idea about having the Service Desk create catalog items. We are discussing the idea about a widget to promote new catalog items, but want to make we're helping people find catalog items at the time they go looking for them/when they need them. Oftentimes people are settled into asking for something they way they always have and don't know that a specific item is now available for what they need.

Appreciate you sharing!