How to add Work Notes to stories from CWM board?

[Tom Sienkiewicz]

Hi, I am struggling to find where the activity section of CWM can be configured.

There seems to only be a possibility to add "Comments". But I need to enable adding Work Notes instead.

If anyone can point me to the right place that would be great.

Many thanks!

[Dan_Junqueira]

Hey @Tom Sienkiewicz  how are you?

I don’t think you’re missing a configuration in the Activity tab.

The Story record itself (rm_story) definitely supports Work notes OOB. ServiceNow still documents Work notes as a standard Story field.

Check this article - https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/it-business-management/collaborative-work-management/configure-for...

What seems to be different in CWM is the side-panel experience. The Activity tab is presenting the Comments composer, and from what I can see this is not controlled by the normal rm_story form layout in the same way as the Details section.

One thing I would try first is adding Work notes to the CWM view of the Story form:

rm_story.list → open a Story → View > CWM → configure the form and add Work notes.

ServiceNow specifically documents that Stories use the CWM view of rm_story for the fields displayed in the CWM side panel.

See this article too - https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/it-business-management/agile-development/create-a-story.html?

So that may give you Work notes from the Story details, although it will not necessarily replace the Comments input you highlighted in the Activity tab.

If your requirement is specifically:

Activity tab → type update → save as Work notes instead of Comments

then I don’t currently see an OOB configuration documented for switching that CWM composer from Comments to Work notes. In that case, I would avoid customizing the CWM component unless it is really necessary.

As another option, you can use the open full details icon from the side panel and update Work notes on the normal Story form. The underlying Story still uses rm_story, so the Work notes remain on the same record.

Interestingly, ServiceNow also documents Work notes as supported directly on Stories in other experiences, so this looks more like a limitation of the current CWM user experience than a limitation of the Story data model itself.

One more - https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/it-business-management/collaborative-work-management/configure-for...

I’d be interested to hear from the CWM product team whether exposing Work notes directly in this Activity composer is planned, because I can definitely see the use case.

Hope this helps. If it does, please mark the response as useful.

[Tom Sienkiewicz]

Hi Dan,

thank you so much for taking the time to review and give recommendations.

Adding Work Notes in CWM view for rm_story was the first thing I tried, indeed this does not affect the Activity tab in the CWM sidebar.

Opening the story in full details seems to be the workaround to use for now.

Fully agree on avoiding any customization of CWM workspace, it gets a lot of updates all the time so it is critical to stay aligned I think.

I really do hope we get the possibility to control whether work notes or comments or both should be displayed soon, for Stories I don't see much usage for Comments but Work Notes are heavily used by every agile team member in our org.