Best practices for long pending tickets and requests

[ycd]

Just checking what best practices folks are following to address the concern below.

We have quite a few Incidents and Service Requests that are open under various teams for long time (months, up to years). We would like to reduce this backlog.

Few(very few) teams are quite good at using the tool and closing their tickets regularly, but others aren't.

Obviously, we can socialize the process with the violators, and have them follow the tool. We tried it, it works for a while, but after some time we are back to the squire-one.

I totally understand that its a people-not-following-the-process issue. However, just want to check what processes/workflow-automations worked best for others who may have gone through this in their org.

Thank you.

CC

[JP - Kyndryl]

Hi ycd,

Why not add a little competition between your groups, like adding this "Old Incidents in Groups" in the "ITIL Dashboard".   And promote this OOTB dashboard to your support teams since it is very useful for them.

[ycd]

Thanks JP, this was very helpful. I will keep the thread open for a few days to see if others want to contribute.

[Mike_R · Accepted solution]

I find that not every team lives in ServiceNow, and they simply forget to close out tickets.

What has worked for me is a daily digest email:

1. A daily email goes to each Assigned to person and gives them a list active tickets assigned to them. (single consolidated email)

2. A daily email goes to each Assignment group manager, and give them a list of active tickets assigned to their group. (this is also a single consolidated email).

Also, create a standardized dashboard for each team so when they log into ServiceNow, their tickets are right in front of them and they don't need to dig around the platform to find them. You'll be surprised at how many people have trouble navigating ServiceNow.

And lastly, have someone own each process and they will do the follow up for tickets over 30 days, etc.:

Incident Manager

Problem Manager

Change Manager

Request Manager

[ycd]

Super Helpful, Mike! Thank you!