Problem Management – What’s new Washington

[mattlloyd]

Manage problems and problem tasks in Service Operations Workspace (SOW) 5.0.
It’s been a while, last time we looked at what was new in San Diego.

What’s new at a glance in Washington:

• With Problem Management for SOW 5.0, problem coordinators can:
  • Manage problems and problem tasks through their life cycle
  • Share workarounds or fixes with related incidents
  • Create known error articles to help deflect incidents
• Updated documentation for SOW:
  • Configuring problem management in SOW
  • Problem management in SOW

Problem Management for SOW 5.0

In earlier versions of SOW, you could only create problems and problem tasks. To manage problems and problem tasks you were directed to the classic experience.

Starting in SOW 5.0, problem coordinators can manage problems and problem tasks in the same workspace.

Requirements to manage in SOW

• ServiceNow with Washington patch 2 (or later)
• Service Operations Workspace 5.0 (or later)
• Using the Washington base problem life cycle:
  • Base problem life cycle means the Problem Management Best Practice – Madrid – State Model plugin
    (com.snc.best_practice.problem.madrid.state_model) is activated
  • If the plugin is not activated, you can adopt the base problem life cycle with the Problem Management Migration Utility store application

If you do not meet the above requirements, you will be directed to the classic experience to manage problems and problem tasks.

Manage problems and problem tasks through their life cycle

We’ve brought the base problem life cycle actions that were already available in classic, into SOW, see the life cycle of a problem and the life cycle of a problem task.
This means problem coordinators can now manage problems and problem tasks in SOW.

Here are a couple of examples of the problem life cycle actions in SOW.

Problem life cycle actions screenshot – New state

Problem life cycle actions screenshot – Root Cause Analysis state

Share workarounds or fixes with related incidents

When you share a workaround or fix, an event is raised so related incidents know that a workaround or fix is available. The Incident process decides what to do with that information, see synchronization between incident and problem records.

Note: In classic, these actions are Communicate workaround and Communicate fix, but we have simplified the names in SOW as they have nothing to do with communications from the Major Incident Management product.

Problem screenshot – Share workaround and Share fix with related incidents

Create known error articles to help deflect incidents

If the problem has enough of an impact that additional users could be affected, it is a good idea for the problem coordinator to create a known error article (a type of knowledge article) to help deflect incidents.

Creating a known error article from the problem creates a draft article, ready to be published, that is based on the problem statement, description, workaround, and cause notes.

Problem screenshot – Create known error article to help deflect incidents

Next steps

You can read more about SOW 5.0 in the documentation and related release notes.
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