Average Time to Fulfill Request

[Gorden McGregor]

Hi all!

I've been tasked with creating a report to show the average time spent to fulfill a request. I'm rather new to all of this, and am not sure if I'm hitting the mark with the report I've put together or not.

Source Type: Table

Table: Request (sc_request)

Group By: Closed

Aggregation: Average // Business Duration

Requests in our system do not have SLAs assigned to them.

Thank you for your help and advisement!

- GM

[Uncle Rob]

Hey Gorden,

So welcome to one of the stranger design artifacts of ServiceNow.  There's a 3 tier record set for Requests.
Request -> Request Item -> SC_Task

Want to know which of those holds "what this is for?"  Its the Request Item (or RITM as we say).  Once upon a time ServiceNow imagined that all users would approach the catalog like a grocery store.  "I'll order one of these, these, these, and these".  The request was a metaphor for a shopping cart, and the RITMs were the individual ordered things.  Over 10 years what we've all realized is the vast majority of Requests only have 1 item.

Why does this matter?  Because once you know how long requests take, you'll want to know how to reduce that time... but that's an irrelevant question unless you know what workflows take the most time (and remember, that's a RITM thing, not a REQ thing!).  So whatever solution you build to time the Requests, you should also pre-emptively do the same for RITM.  The latter will give MUCH more interesting results.

For example:
- The average time to close all requests is 3 days.  Some of your requests are new hire onboarding... so 3 days may be heroic.  Others are password resets, so 3 days might as well be all the time that has ever passed in the universe.

What you've ordered matters!

[Gorden McGregor]

Robert,

Yeah, requests and their shenanigans are a fun time.

So I should probably expound a little further on the issue as well as my history with SNOW. I used SNOW prior to my current position, just didn't have any prolonged experience writing reports or configuring dashboards. BUT! - The organizational structure was completely different, as it will be, compared to how it's configured in my current position. (2 different workplaces)

I would expect the workflow to resemble something along the lines of:

REQ = Govt Agency

RITM = Division or Team

TASK = Individual working the line item

In actuality it's been configured as:

REQ = Govt Agency

RITM = Govt Agency (still)

TASK = Dumps to one team, to then have what's not worked by that team sent to the Service Desk for reassignment to the correct team

The request is to track the average length of time, from REQ open to REQ close, for REQs in the system. Is there a way to put together a report to return the average duration of REQs in the system (we are 24x7) even without an SLA on the REQ function?

I should also probably mention, I'm strictly putting reports together. I don't have access to development or configuration under the hood, lowly Service Desk minion here. It's strictly working with what came stock.

Thanks,

Gorden