Most people probably use Visual Task Boards (VTBs) in ServiceNow to help drive conversations about planned work, progress, and current status. The tool is easy to use and flexible to help with those conversations, and you can easily drag and drop cards to different lanes to quickly reflect what is learned in the course of the dialog.
In case you ever want to push the information from the VTB to others, you can easily write reports against an existing Out of Box table (vtb_card). There are report columns available to display the board and lane names, along with any task specific details (assignment group, assigned to, etc.). The colored dots on the top of the board will generate a true value in the report's Label columns for any cards tagged by the dot. For example in the image below, dragging the blue dot onto the "Update Files/Records" card makes the Label 2 column true.
In the image, the colored circles show the mapping from VTB to report column...most are pretty obvious and intuitive, the exception is the Label 1, Label 2 columns, which will mirror the sequence of the colored dots. Meaning if a red dot labelled "Defect" is the first dot listed on the board, it will be Label 1 in the report.
The other piece that may be valuable is the display/sort order of the report. If you tend to place the cards on the board based on priority or some other form of ranking and want to reflect that in your report, you can accomplish this by using a sort of Lane and Order. The Order column will reflect the order in which the cards are displayed within each lane on the board; an order value of 0 is the highest/top card in the lane.
Here's what an example looks like; it's also attached as PDF in case it is easier to view that way...
Bradlie,
See the comment above from
One example is shown below. Note that because multiple tags can be applied to a single card, the Tags field type won't allow you to do some things (order, group by, etc.) in the report. So it may be a report that you would want to export to Excel to manipulate:
If you haven't played around with metrics before, you can see an example of an out of box one by opening any incident. In the Additional actions menu at the top left corner of the incident form, there is an option for "Metrics Timeline". In the example of an incident, it shows the breakdown of how long the ticket sat with each assigned to, and how much time it was in each state.
Metrics are created from the Metrics > Definitions module, and are targeted to a specific table and field. The data is stored in the metric_instance table, so you can report against that table and see start/end timestamps, calculated durations, etc.
Here's one example for an incident:
So that may give you more flexibility to work with than the VTB Card History table. The product docs site has some overview info on metric instances here.
Sean
