Service Design Package (SDP) - Anyone use the preconfigured knowledge category for this?

[John Kirn]

I've been evaluating Service Portfolio Management in New York, and am really liking what I'm seeing.  I manage the creation of Service Design Packages (SDPs) for all the services in my company's internal facing Service Catalog, and I can totally see using ServiceNow Service Portfolio Management to track all the details in these SDPs as the service moves through its life cycle phases (Pipeline > Catalog > Retired).

I'm struggling with figuring out how to use ServiceNow to create SDPs for the services defined in Service Portfolio Management.  I found this ServiceNow doc that states "Navigate to Service Desk > Knowledge and click IT in categories, a preconfigured knowledge category called ‘Service Design Package’ lists all relevant information about the service."  

I did indeed find this preconfigured knowledge category called ‘Service Design Package’, located in the IT categories, but I must be missing something.  Selecting that category when creating a new Knowledge article doesn't do anything special... I'm not seeing that it "lists all relevant information about the service".  I tried this with both New York and Madrid.

Anyone use this preconfigured knowledge category to create SDPs?  Thanks!

[David Thigpen]

Hi John - 

To the best of my knowledge, you're right.  There's nothing special about that KB category.

We've had some discussions around how we might handle SDPs within ServiceNow.  We are leery of expanding the Service record to include all possible data that might be in an SDP, but we did add some new fields to the Service record as of New York, especially concerning the persons in the organization that are part of the overall support and enablement structure of the service.   You may have to expose them on your forms.  

Often, customers will attach the SDP document to the service (or offering) record.  That's OK, but the data in the SDP is somewhat "locked away."  

I should also mention, where that KB category is very useful is as a container of the SDPs for all the services being supported by the organization and in your service portfolio (and available to the organization at large.)  If I recall, a KB article can reference a CI directly, so you could create a new Knowledge article that contains all your SDP data (build a template!) for a given service, then reference the service directly from the KB article.  Once again, you may need to expose the CI field on the KB form.  We've also discussed exposing service related KB in the Service Owner Workspace.  

Can you share with us the information you include in your SDP documentation and what gaps you see in the Service record?  

David

[John Kirn]

The data that is collected in an SDP is going to vary by company, defined largely by each company’s ITIL maturity.  I can totally see why ServiceNow would be leery about expanding the Service record to include anything an SDP could contain.

The main reason I’m checking out ServieNow’s Service Portfolio Management capabilities is we’ve outgrown using static docs for our SDPs.

New York’s Service record fields (including the unexposed ones) appear to be a good starting place for SDP data… and I’m assuming custom user fields could be added to fill in the gaps.  I’ve begun experimenting with that, and I’m also playing around with using KB articles to store data that doesn’t fit into an out-of-the-box Service record.  My SDP templates are too complex to be converted to a single templatized KM article, but your suggestions are intriguing, and I’ll continue exploring what can be done.  I also evaluated Service Owner Workspace, and having it tie into Knowledge would be a good addition.

Below is a high-level overview what is documented in our SDP.  I colored the ones I'm seeing an obvious map to a Service record in green, although I'm sure I missed a couple. 

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Service Name
Service Description
Background Information
Justification
Service Applicability

Service Owner
Service Architect
Executive Sponsor
Stakeholders
Service Design Manager

Goals
Success Criteria
Assumptions
Deliverables

Service Scope Statement
What is in Scope
What is out of Scope

Service and Operations Impacted
Issues and Risks

Business Benefit

Technical Assessment

Capacity Assessment

Price & Cost Model
Budgets

Service Levels Requirements

Service Infrastructure
Service Technology
Service Management
Vendors Involved
Supporting Agreements

PoC Requirements
PoC Analysis & Review

Operational Status
Launch Date
Retired Date

Department Supporting the Service
Monitoring Requirements
Maintenance Schedule

[David Thigpen]

Thanks John - 

A good list.  We'll keep this in mind going forward.  Thank you for sharing.

David

[caitlinmarkham]

Hi John, 

I'm a Product Manager at SN conducting discovery research on how we might better support service design and definition activities as an extension of the SOW. Based on your feedback, it sounds like you would be a great person to talk to and I would like to learn more about how you design/define your services. If you're interested in sharing more feedback, please send me an email at caitlin.markham@servicenow.com. 

Looking forward to the conversation, 

Caitlin