Best Practices for recurring / scheduled tasks

[PierreDumoulin]

Hey gang,

I've been doing some reading on other articles pertaining to recurring tasks. Other clients seem to have the same need whereby some team responsibilities, known to be some type recurring maintenance, need to be put on the radar. It also makes sense that these tasks appear in the team's regular workload. In the context of ITSM, any given assignment group or team could be expected to process incidents, requests (catalog tasks), problems (problem tasks), change orders, etc. on a regular basis.

Here's where I feel it gets tricky: requests in general very much imply that they are created spontaneously when a need arises (most likely from a client). Metrics like overall lifetime (time between open and close dates) or SLAs actually encourage some expediency and tickets with short lifetimes, i.e. quickly addressing the client's needs, are praised.

It's not so clear cut for tasks we know will be required at a specific time, which could be weeks or months from now. I've seen people suggesting scheduled templates, which is an interesting option. However, this doesn't work wonders for planning since you don't yet see the tasks that will be created later. Having the actual task on the board asap maximizes visibility and ensures we know what's coming at any given time, however, at the cost of any sense of urgency since there is a specifically expected timeframe or deadline for them (same could be said for a scenario like onboarding a new employee. It's not about how fast it's closed, it's about meeting a deadline). I know that, for example, dedicated request categories with less restrictive SLAs could be an option, but that seems somewhat involved.

Without going into technical details, I'd like to solicit your feedback on any best practices you may have adopted in this regard. Thanks in advance for your attention! looking forward to discussing this with you all!

[Mike_R]

I'm not sure if ServiceNow is considering something similar OOTB. Maybe you can check with your account manager to see if they have any insights.

If you work for a SN Partner and you decide to move forward with this, I would suggest creating something that is scalable and very configurable, and then you can publish the app on the ServiceNow store.

My audience adopted the solution right away and loved it. I think mainly because they had a desperate need to for a way to manage their maintenance/recurring tasks. 

If your existing dashboards or reports are reporting on the Task table, this new task type will automatically be included and show up.  Also, we decided not to have SLAs, but we were able to easily report on overdue tasks, because each task had a due date.