Implementation office hours Q&A - Major Incident Management for ITSM

[anthonycamp]

Q. What is best approach to having an approval (someone to review email content before it is sent). I am thinking add approval field and flow.

SOW's Major Incident Management uses communication templates and recommended actions to drive stakeholder notifications. The challenge is that OOB MIM doesn't have a native "approve before send" gate — so you do need to build something, but how much you build depends on your tolerance for customization.

The easiest and recommended option is the manual Hold field and flow see below:

-> Add a checkbox or choice field to the Major Incident record — something like
     Communication Ready for Approval
-> Drafting the email content populates a u_comm_draft field on the record
-> A Flow Designer flow triggers when that field is checked, creates an approval
     task routed to the MIM Manager
-> On approval → triggers the actual notification
-> On rejection → sends a to-do back to the drafter with comments

Q.  How do we conceptualize outages and service status to this process (MIM)

Think of MIM and service status as a three-layer stack that connects technical failures to business impact:
      Business Services (what the business cares about)
     ↓
     Technical Services / CIs (what's actually broken)
     ↓
     Major Incident (the structured response vehicle)

The goal of MIM is to always anchor the response — and the communication — to business impact, not just technical symptoms. Not "a server is down" but, "the order processing system is unavailable affecting 2,000 users."

The Ideal MIM flow with status and outage integrated would look like this:
    P1 Incident Detected
    → Major Incident Declared in SOW
    → Affected CIs identified → Service Map traversal → Business Services auto-populated
    → Outage record created (downtime clock starts)
    → Status set to "Investigating" → Initial stakeholder notification drafted
    → Approval gate (your flow from earlier)
    → Notification sent
    → Status updates at each stage (Identified → Monitoring → Resolved)
    → Outage record closed (availability data captured)
    → Post-Incident Review triggered

Q.  On-Call scheduling is not part of MIM is it? I thought it was a different module?

Its actually a platform feature and is part of ITSM SOW, Making it the perfect "bolt on" to MIM.

Q.  How are you handling the SMS with carriers like AT&T no longer offering email to SMS?

This is actually a carrier issue, not a ServiceNow one. AT&T and others are deprecating email to SMS making that channel obsolete regardless of platform. Your best options are integrating a proper SMS provider like Twilio or leaning into MS Teams push notifications for MIM escalations which a lot of customers are doing.

Q.  Does Major Incident Management work for smaller organizations?

MIM in SOW was designed with enterprise scale in mind — large NOCs, dedicated MIM Managers, mature CMDBs, 24/7 staffing. But that doesn't mean smaller organizations can't get real value from it. It just means you right-size it based on your maturity for example:

 Think of it as MIM Lite — same spine, less ceremony:

Q. Why should we implement the On-call shift roster when the SPOC (Single Point of Contact) list is working fine?

If your SPOC list is working, that's real. Don't let anyone sell you a solution to a problem you don't have. The question worth asking is — working fine right now, or working fine at scale and under pressure?

A SPOC list is essentially a static contact directory with tribal knowledge baked in. Someone knows to call Sarah for networking issues and Dave for the database. It works because people know people.

The risk isn't today. The risk is:

->Sarah leaves
->Dave is on vacation during a P1
->A new team member doesn't know the list exists
->The list is six months out of date and nobody noticed

Below is what the shift roster adds that a SPOC list might fall short of:

  

A healthy way to think of this is that you are not replacing the SPOC list, you are using the Shift roster to operationalize it.

Q.  What if you don't have a functioning CMDB in ServiceNow?

MIM can function without a healthy CMDB. The CMDB enhances MIM — it doesn't power it. You lose some automation and intelligence, but the core process still works and still delivers value.

Q.  There is a limitation on how many users are added to the communication plan i believe it is 99....will ServiceNow in a future release consider increasing this limit based on the dynamic list of addresses?

The 99 recipient limit on MIM communication plans is a known constraint in ServiceNow. It stems from how the platform handles email recipient lists on notification records — it's a field length / query limitation, not an arbitrary design choice. Good news is ServiceNow is aware and is actively reviewing for possible solutioning.

Q.  Overall, ServiceNow is very customizable. I've asked our Dev team to add some additional functionality but was told that many areas of the MIM workbench are in read only.  Any plans, to open it up a bit more?
Much of the flexibility and development effort to allow more customization is being targeted via SOW. With the direction to have more and more customers leverage the workspace vs UI16; this has reduced building additional function and feature into UI16. Important to note the distinction between configuration and customization as most often we find that a configuration does exist to meet the desired outcome.

Q.  How can I view multiple possible fix teams in a single view for a specific Major incident? Today the experts on call is tied to the group assignment.

This is currently a core limitation. The Experts on Call panel is coupled to the assignment group, which assumes one team owns the incident. Real major incidents almost never work that way. Good news is there are enhancement requests/feedback records actively in the review pipeline. That said below is a possible "short term" solutions/workaround:

      Possible workaround: MIM Tasks Within the Workbench

     ->SOW's MIM workbench has a Tasks panel natively
     ->Create a MIM Task per fix team — each assigned to a different group
     ->All visible within the workbench without leaving context
     ->Limitation: Mixes fix team tasks with other action items — gets noisy fast
     ->Best for: Lighter weight incidents with 2-3 fix teams max

Extra Goodies:

1) If you would like to learn more about Best practices for On-call Scheduling and a demo, check out our Autonomous IT Academy Series on On-Call Scheduling - https://www.servicenow.com/community/itsm-events/servicenow-exchange-autonomous-it-academy-on-call-b...

2) Helpful blog on SOW value and why use SOW for your org - https://www.servicenow.com/community/itsm-articles/service-operations-workspace-sow-enhancing-organi...