Hello Community,
Have you come across ServiceNow’s Granular Delegation and wondered what it does or how it differs from the standard delegation we’ve used for years?
Standard Delegation:
We all know Standard Delegation is an all-or-nothing approach. It lets you delegate your assignments, approvals, notifications and meeting invites, all relying on the sys_user_delegate table.
But what if you want to delegate specific Incident assignments to one-person, specific Change approvals to another person and specific Catalog Items requests to someone else entirely?
For example: If an IT Director delegates their IT Hardware approvals to a subordinate while on vacation, that subordinate (provided he/she has access to these records) doesn't just get IT hardware approvals. They also get other request approvals that they shouldn't be touching!
Standard Delegation simply can't provide flexibility for conditional delegation or access restrictions (who can request which delegation) making it quite challenging in organizations with strict compliance processes.
Standard Delegation:
Here Comes Granular Delegation: An advanced way to delegate assignments, approvals, notifications, and meeting invites with much tighter control:
- Delegate records based on conditions (e.g., only route P1 Incidents or specific catalog request approval).
- Define who can be the delegate for given delegatation rule by defining criteria (the person working on someone's behalf).
- Define who can be the delegator for a given delegation rule by defining criteria (the person who wants to delegate their work).
- Group delegations using categories (so users have clean buckets on the portal)
Let's dive in and understand each component, see how to set it up and walk through an example:
1) Make sure to install the plugin if it's not installed already:
plugin (com.glide.granular_service_delegation)
2)once installed we can see below options
The delegation_admin role comes with this plugin and manages the first four options shown below. You can assign this role to a developer or process owner to manage/set up these records
A Delegate Rules: This is to create a Delegation Rule (you will understand this better during the example walkthrough).
B. Delegation Rules Tables: Add tables to use in the delegation rules shown above. Note that we have a specific set of tables to select from (not all tables are available here).
C. Delegation Rule Categories: You can add categories here; this will help group your delegation rules.
D. you can create a new delegate and a delegate rule (you can also do this from the portal as well, will see that later)
E. My delegates: Check the delegates you created (you can also see these on the portal).
F. Delegated to Me : View items delegated to you (if you can access the Native UI) otherwise, you will get notified about your delegated items by default.
Now that we have looked at the options, lets see an example!
Example 1: Delegate Incidents (where the CI is ServiceNow) to another member of the same group, ensuring that only members of the ServiceNow Dev group can use this rule (As Delegate and Delegator)
1. Create the Delegation Rule shown below:
where CI - ServiceNow Production and Assignments (this includes notifications by default)
Please ask your process owners/devs to enable the All Notifications and All Meeting Invites checkboxes on your delegation records if required. By default, notifications are enabled for a given delegation rule.
2. This is the User Criteria created and added to both the Delegator and Delegate User Criteria fields
only user from the ServiceNow Dev team can use this!!
ServiceNow dev members:
3. Let's go to the ESC portal as System Administrator to delegate these tickets to John Meloni.
4. If I try to select someone outside of the group, I can't select the delegation rule, as shown below (so user criteria is working)
5. If I pick John Meloni, I can select the Delegation Rule created above.
6. When an incident is created with the Configuration Item set to 'ServiceNow Production'
it appears under Self-Service > My Work, and an email notification is sent to the delegated user, as shown below:
Incident:
My Work queue: Impersonated John Meloni and could see the incident under My work queue
Email: An email sent to Joh Meloni as well 😍
In the same way, we can test the approval scenario as well.
Example Scenario: Delegate Finance Request approvals to users in the Finance department only.
I hope you give this a try!
One important question here: can we use standard delegation alongside granular delegation?
The answer is yes. This is controlled by the system property below, which offers three configuration.
"glide.approval.delegation.version"
Happy Learning
Thank you,
Hemanth
Certified Technical Architect (CTA), ServiceNow MVP 2024, 2025, 2026
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