Can We Help You? Difference between Defect and Incident? Difference between Idea and Enhancement?

Laurie Marlowe1 · ‎05-30-2017

Hello,

I am reviewing baseline functionality in my developer's instance, and comparing to what we have in our instance. In the Service Catalog, under "Can We Help You", there is Report a Defect and Create an Incident. Other than the type of ticket that is opened, and where it routes, what is the difference or definition? I have the same question about Idea and Enhancement. How does the customer know which to select? The descriptions seem very similar.

Thank you in advance!

Laurie

Dave Smith1 · ‎05-30-2017

There's not much difference between an incident and defect - both are about reporting something out of the ordinary. However, the term "report something defective" or "let us know something's broken" is a bit more human than "Create an incident", so could be more appealing than the standard record-creating route.

An idea may not necessarily be an enhancement - for example, one idea could be to roll out some specific system in place, and later on down the line enhancements may be suggested to shape its functionality closer to business needs now that it's bedded in place and we're starting to see its shortfalls. However, they're both largely the same thing: a suggestion.

Really, the bigger question should be: how are they going to be processed? If defects and incidents are both going to follow an incident management process, you may want to consider harmonising them as one easier-to-understand entry point to the IM process. Similarly with ideas and enhancements (for what it's worth, Ideas are also a potentially entry point to an RFC).

So: consider your stakeholders, identify their outcomes in the form of goals of value, design a workflow that realises the process stages between individuals then build screens and forms that present the right information in a meaningful fashion to each person at the relevant process stage. It's not really important what they're currently called right now, what's more important is what YOU want to call them when presenting them to business users (I've been on a project where "Ideas" were renamed "Kaizens" because they used suggestion boxes internally).

That's the power and flexibility of the platform: customisations are pretty easy and can be done (and reverted!) quickly.

Good luck!

View solution in original post

Chuck Tomasi · ‎05-30-2017

HI Laurie,

Defects are often associated with problems with existing software.

Incidents are generic 'break/fix' - could be software, could be hardware.

Ideas are just that - ideas for new software solutions (don't exist yet)

Enhancements - ideas or updates to existing software solutions.

balaji_charapal · ‎05-30-2017

Incident : An interruption to an IT Service or reduction in the quality of an IT service.

http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Incident_Management#gsc.tab=0

Idea : With the Ideas module, business users can create and submit ideas. The demand manager evaluates the submitted ideas and promotes accepted ideas to demands.

On accepting Idea Demand will be automatically created in Servicenow

Ideas module

Enhancement : if we want to enhance the oob functionality we will go with enhancement

Enhancement Requests in Scrum - ServiceNow Wiki

Dave Smith1 · ‎05-30-2017

There's not much difference between an incident and defect - both are about reporting something out of the ordinary. However, the term "report something defective" or "let us know something's broken" is a bit more human than "Create an incident", so could be more appealing than the standard record-creating route.

An idea may not necessarily be an enhancement - for example, one idea could be to roll out some specific system in place, and later on down the line enhancements may be suggested to shape its functionality closer to business needs now that it's bedded in place and we're starting to see its shortfalls. However, they're both largely the same thing: a suggestion.

Really, the bigger question should be: how are they going to be processed? If defects and incidents are both going to follow an incident management process, you may want to consider harmonising them as one easier-to-understand entry point to the IM process. Similarly with ideas and enhancements (for what it's worth, Ideas are also a potentially entry point to an RFC).

So: consider your stakeholders, identify their outcomes in the form of goals of value, design a workflow that realises the process stages between individuals then build screens and forms that present the right information in a meaningful fashion to each person at the relevant process stage. It's not really important what they're currently called right now, what's more important is what YOU want to call them when presenting them to business users (I've been on a project where "Ideas" were renamed "Kaizens" because they used suggestion boxes internally).

That's the power and flexibility of the platform: customisations are pretty easy and can be done (and reverted!) quickly.

Good luck!