Topic detail & HR service Best Practices

[nthipol]

Wondering how others determined what Topic Details and HR Service option to make available for use for their companies use of servicenow.

When we began using servicenow it came pre-loaded with some HR related Topic details and HR service options but I am worried about adding too many. 

I was thinking about running reports and going through what is being marked as "general" in Topic detail or in HR service but I was hoping to get a feel for what others are doing because I would like to keep it simple without too many options but don't want everything to keep being marked general.

Ive attached what we currently have for Topic Details and HR Services but just looking for what others are doing or their best practices 

[Rob Sestito]

Hey there nthipol,

I will start off by saying, it will probably be more of a trial and error ongoing "thing". As an organization, we actually started off using the non-scoped hr application - and used category / subcategory for our hr cases. We have now been using scoped hr application for most of this year. Our go-live date was August 8th, and we STILL go through revamping our hr services. As your organization grows and changes, so will services you provide to your employees.

Overall, I would say you may want to disable (not delete), most or all OOB hr services that your instances has. Reason I say that is because some of the OOB services, actually have other processes/workflows attached to them. For a couple of examples: Both HR Profile Update and Tuition Reimbursement have their own workflows attached, however are not built out completely. You will need to (if you have not see and done so already), complete their process on how they will work. We missed these two going forward. HR Profile Update was a big one. We use Workday as the main HCM for our employees. So - if you and I worked together and you called in to update something from your workday profile, I would use the HR Profile Update service, not knowing there was an added back-end workflow about to take over. When this service is being used, it would automatically create an HR Task and want to send a form to the Requestor to fill out and send back through the system. But, this service not being fully built out, the form never went anywhere. The system then "took it back", closed the Task automatically, and then did the same to the Parent Case. This was causing a lot of confusion among out HR Agents that take the phone calls (HR Call Center if you will). When an HR service does this, it will typically mean it has a Record Produces attached to it. So, if you want to use any OOB services, I would double check and make sure they don't have any Record Producers attached that create their own workflow.

As to the HR General aspect of the services - we had to deal with the Transfer UI Action... A LOT.... We get a ton of incoming emails that flow right into the HR General service. Our HR Call center agents, then comb through them as they are essentially Unassigned Cases. They then have to transfer them into the correct COE/HR Service. We had to reach out to ServiceNow themselves, in order to see what could be done about this part of the system. I get the whole transfer functionality, but it isn't ideal for us as an organization. We had to really work around what all the transfer cases would look like. Because they flow to a state of Cancel, and reporting wise, that looks bad. In one week, we would/could have between 400-500 canceled cases because they had to be transferred to their correct COE from the HR General. Again, just not ideal. So we built out a whole new process with notifications to the end user and when they are sent out. And for reporting help, just recently I built a new feature.

When a case is cancelled, the Assigned To has to pick from a choice field - cancellation reason, and then the case is in a state of cancelled. When a case is transferred, it goes into the same state, cancelled. What I did was, make it so the system automatically puts all Transferred cases into a newly created 'Transferred' Cancellation Reason. This way, when creating certain reports, we can see specifically those transferred cases in a cancelled state as Transferred for their reason. This just simplified certain reports that are being ran for our directors and above to see.

Sorry this was really dragged out, but it is a little tough to explain a best practice for something that will always continue to change/be revamped. However, I hope I was able to provide some type of good feedback for you.

If you have more questions, please don't hesitate to ask and I can try to answer - in shorter versions 🙂

Take care and good luck!

-Rob

[Mrman]

Hi , We have similar requirement to implement HR service Categorization for our customer . Please let me know what approach is followed for mapping Topic Categories and COE . Can you please share the list of Topic Categories and respective Topic Detail for each .

[Anna Gausel]

Hi nthipol,

The HR Migration tool would be useful to explore. I'd recommend looking at the links that @Kiel Sanders shared in this post. He has published a lot of useful resources.

All the best,

Anna