Parent Child Request

[TKS57]

I'm working on the conversion of a department from a JIRA Service Manager (JSM) to servicenow, for request management, and have run up against a problem of trying to emulate the way that JSM allows them to create children of a parent request record.  Has the community come up against this in the past and, more importantly, how did they resolve it?

I suspect that in the use of JSM they have actually gone down an incident workflow path, unwittingly, but now they're convinced that the parent/child functionality is 'request functionality' and won't be swayed by a REQ, RITM, SCTASK solution.

[Rajesh Chopade1]

Hi @TKS57 

In JSM, the parent-child linkage for requests may mirror incident workflows, where issues can be nested and tracked hierarchically. In ServiceNow, the typical request workflow (REQ, RITM, SCTASK) handles request fulfillment, but it doesn’t inherently offer the same type of parent-child relationship seen in incident management.

First, determine if the team truly needs a parent-child relationship or if the typical ServiceNow request hierarchy (REQ > RITM > SCTASK) meets their needs.

If the concern is visibility or traceability, show how related RITMs and tasks can be linked and tracked. You can leverage ServiceNow's "related lists" to create a visual connection between requests and subtasks.

Since they may be leaning toward an incident-based solution, suggest leveraging the Incident module’s parent-child incident functionality. ServiceNow allows linking incidents in a parent-child relationship out-of-the-box. If they have been using JSM’s incident-like functionality, this might be the better fit.

Demonstrate how incidents can be created as child records under a parent incident, and how you can still track them with the same rigor as requests.

If they remain convinced that this should fall under "request" functionality, you can create custom parent-child relationships within the request domain.

You can create a custom field on the sc_request or sc_req_item table to define a parent request. This allows you to manually link requests or request items in a similar hierarchical structure.

Use a business rule or workflow to auto-generate child requests/RITMs under a parent request based on certain conditions.

This will emulate the parent-child relationship in a way that still feels like request management to them.