Retain Department on Incident form once Caller moves to another Department

[LKSN]

Using OOB options, I've added the Caller.Department to the Incident form. 
When an Incident comes in, I want to retain that value at that time so that went the Caller moves to another department later, that incident shows what department they were in at the time they had the issue. 

Right now, if the user changes department all the incidents show the caller's new department. 

I see there's archiving, but if the ticket is still not resolved, I want it to still be active. 

How do other companies handle this? When a user moves from Department A to Department B do you auto-close all the incidents? Do you reassign them to the group that handles that Department? It seems any reference field used on a form will always change once that reference is changed. How do you retain it? Does ServiceNow have something that does that? Thank you in advance. 

[swathisarang98]

Hi @LKSN,

To retain  or to know the previous value you can do something as below,

If you want to do this OOB the field changes can be captured in activity journal,

Go to Filter activity -> Configure available field -> add all the field which you want to capture like Department 

Result:

Tried for assigned to field

And if the ticket is no longer related to your group then you can reassign but make worknote mandatory so that the next group where ticket assigned will get to know the background and the reason why the ticket got  reassigned.

Please mark this comment as Correct Answer/Helpful if it helped you.

Regards,

Swathi Sarang

[James Chun · Accepted solution]

Hi @LKSN,

If you are using a dot-walked field (i.e. caller.department), you will never be able to show its previous value on the form as it will always show you the current value.

If there is a need to retain the original department value, you can create a custom field that references the department table on the Incident table (or the Task table).

And with a Business Rule or some other processes (e.g. Client script, RP script), you can populate the field by fetching the caller's department at the time an Incident was created.

You can refer to the OOB field Location which is populated via a client script that fetches the caller's location when it's created.

Can you elaborate on the business requirement/value here? Just trying to see if there is another solution.

Cheers

[LKSN]

The business use case is that for reporting, the company wants to see how many incidents were requested for each department.  

I'm guessing really the best solution would be to use PA and set date-based indicators?
In theory if the user moves to another department, they usually give up their equipment and the new department provides new. But some don't so if the user had a ticket in for say a keyboard not working, they'd still want to get it fixed. I'm guessing there's other companies like mine that want to know which department the user was in when the ticket was created. Or maybe not! 

[James Chun]

Another option is if you have a well-defined CMDB/services, you can use the service offering field. 

The service offering would have a department record associated with it.

I am not too sure if this would be a best practice, but yes, PA would definitely work here as well.