How to handle requests not in the service catalog

[markyeatman]

We're fairly new to ServiceNow and currently have a limited number of catalog items built out in our end user accessible catalog. We do have a portfolio of overall services but not all the corresponding catalog items and related tasks built out.   Realistically we won't for some time, so until then we're looking for suggestions or examples of how other organizations intake and process requests that are not yet available in the catalog.

We process approximately 10K requests a year and most won't have a corresponding catalog item initially. Offhand it seems we need a methodology functionally similar to how incidents are created and processed as a stop gap until more things are available in the catalog or maybe there's another way to handle this?

Looking for suggestions or examples, initially at a high level, of how other organizations have dealt with this issue. We're aware of the relationships between Requests, Items and Tasks so don't need to cover that unless it's specific to a proposed solution.

[paw2]

Hi Mark,

We just went live with ITIL side in May and will be going live with ESS next week.   We are like you in that we built out a limited requests side.   We included a "Miscellaneous Request" selection with a workflow that sends it to our Service Desk to triage on to the appropriate team.   This includes a variable set with fields for: requested for, phone, pager, department, email, mobile phone, manager, cost center, and description.   See pics below.

Our ITIL side could use the above, but we are also in process of discussing the basic record producer called "create a new enhancement" to handle request from our IT side, modify to include variables desired, put in technical catalog, and then use this for our ServiceNow admins to create a story (we like the format of the story, with points, testing state, etc,).

[markyeatman]

Thanks for the feedback. We've got a handle on the ESS perspective but the it's the users who could potentially create requests and already know the supporting info like who it would be assigned to, what CI, etc that we're struggling with. From a workflow perspective we don't need these to route through the Service Desk obviously and though we know these requests will eventually translate into future catalog items we're still looking for ways to process them efficiently until then.

A good example would be a Supervisor of a functional group (SysOps for example) needs to create a list of requests for his or her team. Essentially they are just trying to enter tasks that need completing but the Req>RITM>Task architecture makes this more complicated than how it's done for Incidents. For now we're just talking about requests that have a one to one relationship with a task that needs completing.

[paw2]

We did something similar to your sysops example for our IT folks.   The request form captured the support group and a few other variables.   The workflow checked the support group and sent approval to the supervisor of that support group ... in your case it could just create a task to the supervisor/manager of that support group or to the support group/assigned to in that group ....   we then enabled "new task" button on the ritm so that the supervisor could create a task or how ever many tasks they wanted to fulfill the request.

This opens open some other considerations, such as setting of complete values for ritm and req when the last task is completed (either in the workflow or manually outside of workflow).   Not insurmountable, but solution would depend on your particulars.

[Lisa Latour]

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