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Work Notes Mandatory When Changing State – How to Disable in Practice Instance?

themadhankumar
Tera Contributor

Hi everyone,

I am practicing in my personal ServiceNow developer instance and working on Incident form behaviour.

I noticed that whenever I change the Urgency or Impact field, Work Notes becomes mandatory and I cannot update the record without entering a value.

This is not related to changing the State to Resolved or Closed. The mandatory requirement happens specifically when Urgency or Impact is modified.

Since this is only a personal practice instance, I would like to understand what is enforcing this behaviour and how I can temporarily disable it for learning purposes.

So far I have checked UI Policies related to Resolution Notes and Data Policies such as Make close info mandatory when resolved or closed.

However, I am still not sure what is making Work Notes mandatory when Urgency or Impact changes.

I would appreciate guidance on the following:

  1. How can I properly identify what is enforcing Work Notes as mandatory?

  2. Is this typically controlled by a UI Policy, Data Policy, Client Script, or Business Rule?

  3. What is the recommended way to make Work Notes non mandatory in a personal developer instance?

Thank you for your help.

2 REPLIES 2

GlideFather
Tera Patron

Hi @themadhankumar,

 

on incident form there's a priority field and this field cannot be changed manually, it is calculated from Urgency and Impact, see Define priority lookup rules for more detials: 

 

Screenshot 2026-03-02 at 13.51.06.png

So when you change Urgency, Impact or both it will automatically update the Priority field. Always.

 

And a change to value in the Priority is trigger for this client script Worknotes mandatory onChange of priority:

Screenshot 2026-03-02 at 13.46.44.png

 

To locate it in your instance, update the URL below and go to:

https://yourinstance.service-now.com/nav_to.do?uri=sys_script_client.do?sys_id=ed5392f3c3122200b6dcdfdc64d3ae96

 

| ___Tip___|

if you want to find something about behaviour on any form (e.g. incident), go to any record and click context menu > configure > all (eventually business rules, client scripts, .....) to review the associated configuration records

Screenshot 2026-03-02 at 13.48.18.png

 

Let me knowif that answered your question or want to know more details about this

_____
100 % GlideFather experience and 0 % generative AI

Ankur Bawiskar
Tera Patron

@themadhankumar 

@GlideFather already shared all the details in his comment.

Please mark his response as correct and close the thread unless you have any additional question.

Regards,
Ankur
Certified Technical Architect  ||  10x ServiceNow MVP  ||  ServiceNow Community Leader