Approvals in Service Operation Workspace

[Tobi3]

Edit:
With the newest version of SOW, all of what I wrote is no longer true.
Approvals work in SOW the same way they work in classic UI 🙂

Hello everyone,

we're facing an issue with the SOW and I just want to ensure that I'm not missing something important. If some parts of the post feel like I'm ranting, that's because I am.

A lot of our customers are using the SOW for basically everything regarding ITSM processes. And one thing that everybody is missing, are approvals. Maybe that's not the idea of the SOW, I don't know.
So what we're usually doing is to add a few lists to the SOW: Approvals > Assigned to you, Open, All
That way, people can easily check their open approvals without leaving the SOW.

But here the problems begin. The ootb UI/UX for approvals in the SOW is very bad. Compared with the classic UI, where you can see the item summary and can do things like denying individual RITMs before approving a request, the SOW approvals are basically blank. I think the RITM approval shows some details, but that's it.
Since you cannot use formatters in workspaces, the classic UI functionality cannot easily be ported to SOW.

What are we left with?
1. always go to the item that needs to be approved to check out the details. In the case of requests, you need to check all RITMs individually as well

2. use classic UI 

3. use Employee Center
4. Customization with UI Builder?

Am I missing something? Is there an easy way to get a great UX in SOW so that people do not need to leave the workspace to do all of their work?

Kind regards,
Tobi

[Ankur Bawiskar]

@Tobi3 

workspace such as SOW is primarily used by agents to work on incidents, problem, change etc

Approvals mostly use portal to approve the request as they are not agents working on tickets.

OR

They use email based approval

I have never seen any approver in any of my implementation who has used SOW to approve/reject

That's the reason approval list is not given OOTB by ServiceNow in SOW

💡 If my response helped, please mark it as correct ✅ and close the thread 🔒— this helps future readers find the solution faster! 🙏

[Tobi3]

What about change approvals? Even request approvals can be done by people who primarily work in SOW.

But as @Mark Manders pointed out, since Zurich there is an approval list in the SOW out of the box.
So apparently ServiceNow changed their mind.