Use of Stage field on Incident form

[gsh1]

Hi all,

I am seeking perspective on the rationale and industry practices regarding the customization of stages in ServiceNow ITSM workflows. As you may know, stages are not included out-of-the-box in ServiceNow ITSM, unlike ServiceNow CSM, which provides stages as a standard feature. 

From an industry standpoint: How frequently do organizations customize ITSM workflows to include stages, and what are the potential benefits or drawbacks? Is there any SNOW alternative like Stepper recommended as an economical solution?

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

Stages are used in ITSM for Request, Problem and Change. Stages are showing where in a 'flow' the ticket is. 

For incident this is not something that can be easily done. Of course you have an Assess, Fix/Resolve, Close flow, but that's just 3. You can use those. But as any Incident mgr can tell you, tickets can go back and forth between groups, or back to the end user, maybe are in need of a change to fix or are attached to a problem. Incident resolving isn't really a linear process like it is with Request (Approval, In progress, Delivery, Done).

Also: your subject talks about 'incident' and your question about ITSM. I am assuming you mean Incident. If not, please elaborate.

[gsh1]

Thanks Mark, yes I mean incident, we want to implement Stage and state field in our account.

[Mark Manders]

Then you can just create the stages and put the stepper on the form, but what 'stages' does an Incident have? A stage is based on the state the incident is in. Especially with incidents, you can be waiting on suppliers, other solution groups, for the end user itself, etc. Stages are mainly useful when you have steps you go through, to see where you are. That's not how Incident resolving works (except my earlier 'Assess/Fix/Close' stages). You can be going back in stages which is weird. What is the use case to implement stages?

[AshishKM]

@gsh1 , I second with @Mark Manders until we don't have solid use case for using stage, do not implement it because the OOTB incident form & process has been designed like that and State field is sufficient to handle that, all other module like service request and CSM has state and stage both it means they have something additional to record & monitor.