Service Portal - End User Experience Best Practices?

[Mike_Bk]

How can the Service Portal catalogue be simplified for the end user experience?

TLDR; skip to 3. Best Practices

A little bit about our usage; We came from Express to Enterprise recently. We are purely ICT with a Service Desk and other 3rd level ICT teams using incidents and requests. We also user Changes and Problems, but that wont be covered in this thread. This is a little off topic, but we are finding lots of issues from our upgrade to Enterprise (heaps of missing menus in the applications navigator - not just the advertised naming convention hangovers from Express, e.g. "Maintain Items" versus "Catalog Items" <-- this I can cope with, but when I follow docs that point to menus that don't exist, lets just say its becoming a little frustrating).

1. Requests
Our ICT staff (fulfillers) use tasks only. A lot of our staff find the 3 layer approach confusing (REQ/RITM/TASK) and it was very hard for them to grasp the concept, especially as they only action the task level. A lot of them wanted to ditch Requests for Incidents with a category of Requests.

The only time we use the RITM level is to retrieve attachments or amend the approvers.

We never use the REQ level.

I understand that the tasks are important to show the progress of the request to the end user and this is important to us as well.

2. Incidents
Not a lot to be said about incidents; very straight forward and easy to process using record producers.

3. Best Practices
We find most end users that currently use the catalogue use the get help record producer because that is the easiest way for them to get help with requests or incidents (besides email, phone or walk-ups). This tells me we are doing service catalogues wrong. How can we make end users want to browse the catalogue?

Let's look at the HI Portal - from what I can tell on the HI Portal you click "Create Incident" and there is a section on the form asking whether it is a request or incident (but in layman terms).

Which leads to me to ask (as I am new to workflows), can you create a catalog item that uses a workflow to create either an incident or request?

So the get "Get Help" button on the Service Portal should take the end user to a form to make a request or report an incident (just like the hi portal) and the "Order Something" to be specifically for ordering new equipment/software. Using the term of "Ordering Something" for a phone extension name change or more email quota doesn't make sense, even though its a request it should be in the "Get Help" section and doesn't really need its own catalog item. It just needs a catch all catalog item.

This would vastly decrease the catalog categories and catalog items for us, which in turn would improve the ability to navigate our service catalog.

I don't want end users to have to dig for what they want, I just want them to tell us what they want.

4. What do you do?
I encourage others to please comment explaining how you tackle requests and incidents on the service portal.

[na93]

Hi Mike,

Did you get anywhere with this? We're in a similar scenario and would be good to know how you went forward.

Thanks