Request Mgmt course quiz question - pre-approved RITMs and REQ approval

[Max Nowak]

Hi,

while doing the ITSM fundamentals on demand course, I stumbled upon the following question in the quiz of the "Request Management: Approval" section:

To my knowledge, and from experience gained by working with request management, my answer ("Fulfillment can begin once the REQ is approved) should be the correct one. In my experience, workflows for RITMs do not get triggered until the request is approved (by actually using an approval workflow, or just auto-approving all requests).

But, ServiceNow seems to think that fulfillment on pre-approved RITMs can begin immediately (see the explanation at the bottom of my screenshot, which states "immediately upon submittal of the request"). Am I wrong about this?

[Allen Andreas]

Hello,

If that is a paid course, please don't post exact questions (especially a screenshot), on the forums. That's not appropriate.

Outside of that, the question says...what if the RITM is preapproved.

So your answer that it can begin once the REQ is approved is not correct.

Preapproved would mean that the RITM is allow to bypass any approval at the Request level and fulfillment can begin (i.e., the RITM flow will begin). Meaning...if the RITM stage is set to: Request Approved (i.e., preapproved), then that RITM flow will begin even though the Request flow is still pending approval and other RITMs may be waiting. The question doesn't tell you all that because it would in turn...give you the answer, but you can research/test this yourself and see the results.

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[Max Nowak]

Hi Allen,

Firstly, the course was free for me, but I'm not sure if it's because the company I work for is a partner. I'll be more mindful of this in the future, thanks for the tip.

Secondly, Is that really what "pre-approved" means? Because in my mind, a pre-approved catalog item is just an item that doesn't have a specific approval workflow, which would then still be gated by the request-level approval. The course, sadly, is not clear on this - but: the exact reason that is given in the grey box as an answer is taken from a paragraph that describes a scenario where approvals are only implemented at the RITM level, and there is no approval at the request level. This leads me to believe that this might be, in fact, a mistake on SNs part.

Also, just out of curiosity, did you ever encounter a ServiceNow environment where the customer implemented a business rule to set the stage of one or multiple specific RITMs in a request to "request approved"?

[Allen Andreas]

Hello,

My apologies if my reply wasn't Helpful.

The course would display a price, even if it was free to you (via partner, etc.), as it would show the strikeout value. In either case, it's just ideal to not copy and paste questions from Now Learning content, especially with screenshot, if you don't mind. I appreciate you considering that for future posts, thank you for considering! 🙂

For your other question, better context may help here, but in order for the RITM workflow to begin, the REQ has to be approved or the RITM has to be told that the REQ level for it has been approved. Again, context of the course material could help, but obviously there can be differing of opinions on what "preapproved" could mean, given by our conversation here.

If ServiceNow is saying the answer is that the RITM fulfillment can begin immediately upon the request being submitted. Then it either means:

1) The request workflow had no blocker and was immediately approved, thus the RITM could begin (and to your point no approval there either) fulfillment.

2) There could have been multiple RITMs involved, the REQ level is held up, but this particular RITM was allowed to pass through by having it's stage set to Request Approved.

The above is all up for debate anyway because who is to say that any workflow for any of it HAS to have approvals anyway? I wouldn't even call it preapproved, it's just simply no approval was required, so yeah, a bit wonky with some of the wording and could be interpreted in a few ways.

For the last piece, I have seen a "preapproved" method per what I described where the REQ may have been held up (due to pricing), but one specific RITM as part of the package (order guide started) still needed to happen anyway and it was in regard to onboarding where the AD process still needed to happen no matter what. The laptop could be denied or whatever, but the user provisioning still needed to happen. If later the REQ was rejected, the following RITM automatically gets updated to rejected/closed, and any open task is closed incomplete as well. There was a notification setup in those situations to alert the assignment team as well as to why (so there wasn't a break in the process by letting the RITM go ahead).

The above was not done by business rule (since you called that out...).

When you said this: "is taken from a paragraph that describes a scenario where approvals are only implemented at the RITM level, and there is no approval at the request level"

Well, out of box, we know that there is an approval, so again, the context matters, but if there a specific scenario that is referring to, then it would imply the thinking this question was in that context (although the question sentence jacks that all up, haha).

In any case, I can't defend the question writer or whatever else, but what I can defend is that technically...a RITM doesn't need to wait until the REQ is approved for the fulfillment to begin.

So, if I'm over here on a technicality, then so be it, but either way, no question for "out of box" ServiceNow processes should require a technicality for the "right" answer to be chosen. It should be based on true out of box settings, so there's still an issue with the question anyway that could be addressed, in my opinion!

To clarify, my reply isn't to say "you're crazy, I have no idea how you came up with the answer you chose"...I'm more so just saying: "well...technically a RITM can proceed without the request being approved and by request approved I mean the workflow/flow for it". That's all.

-Allen