ITIL Best Practice-Converting Request to Incidents

[Gemma4]

From an ITIL Standpoint has anyone converted a Request to an Incident successfully? We received a requirement to allow the Service Desk to convert Hardware Requests to Incidents and we are trying to determine if this is a best practice to do based on ITIL standards or what would be best?  Thank you in advance for any feedback or suggestions you may have. 

Gemma

[Musab Rasheed]

Hello,

No problem with that , make sure you are configuring this setup correctly

Mark my answer as correct if that helps

Regards

[Dan O Connor · Accepted solution]

There are in my opinion two methods/avenues to approach this in the platform. 

1) Requesting user log an Incident. 

This simply involves the agent closing the Request as invalid and directing the user to log an incident. Some teams or departments will look to do this as a way of training/education for staff to raise requests correctly, or educating where these types of requests go. 

Personally it's not a favorite of mine, as I think it's nicer for Help/Service desks to be able to either convert these requests or put them into the correct spots, and just drop a note to the requester. But have seen some scenarios where teams have had to take these hardlines with staff. 

2) Convert a Request to Incident.

There is unfortunately (to my knowledge) no OOTB method to do this yet(You can raise Requests from incidents) so you may need to look into some configuration for this. I've seen/created some nice UI actions that agents can convert Requests to Incidents in a single press. This is obviously if you are looking for a platform method to convert, as opposed to the agent just manually recreating for the user.

At a high level though your use case is pretty common, and it's definitely something plenty of people do. I don't think there is a definitive ITIL process to cover this, it's somewhat depending on your environment and you will know your staff best 🙂 

[Mohit Kaushik]

Hi Gemma,

It is for all hardware requests or there will be some conditional approach. If it is for all hardware requests then instead of converting the requests to incident, I would suggest you to have a record producer for the same and let it log the requests as incident.

In this way you can fetch the right information from the user and set it into the incident in no time.

Record Producer (servicenow.com)

Please mark this as correct and helpful if it resolved the query or lead you in right direction.

Thanks,
Mohit Kaushik
Community Rising Star 2022

[Gemma4]

Thank you all for the feedback. Do you know if there are any ITIL standards on converting requests to incidents since requests are defined differently on many levels?