Task Communications Management process
Summarize
Summary of Task Communications Management process
Task Communications Management streamlines communication during events like major incidents, planned maintenance, and releases by enabling the creation of predefined communication plans. These plans specify tasks, communication methods, frequencies, and target audiences, allowing your team to focus on issue resolution rather than managing communication logistics.
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How It Works
- Define communication plans tailored to specific events, including a series of communication tasks.
- Specify communication channels such as email and SMS, and set communication frequencies (one-time or recurring) for each task.
- Identify the target audience or stakeholders to be contacted for each task.
- Associate communication plans automatically with task records based on defined conditions.
- Execute communication tasks sequentially, ensuring timely and appropriate stakeholder engagement.
Practical Example: Major Incident Management
For a high-priority major incident, you can predefine a communication plan with conditions (e.g., Priority = High, Incident state = Accepted) that automatically attach the plan to the incident record. The plan may include tasks such as:
- Initiate Technical Communications: One-time email to technical stakeholders.
- Technical Status Update: Recurring email and SMS updates to stakeholders like service owners of affected configuration items (CIs).
This setup allows major incident managers to communicate efficiently and promptly, reducing delays in incident resolution.
Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Improved communication efficiency during critical events.
- Predefined plans reduce manual effort and errors in stakeholder notifications.
- Supports multiple communication channels and frequencies to fit diverse stakeholder needs.
- Enhances collaboration and speeds up issue resolution by ensuring the right information reaches the right people at the right time.
Task Communications Management helps you to streamline the process by creating designated communication plans for effective communication during an event. The communication plan, with its defined tasks, helps you to focus on resolving the current issue instead of deciding when to send a communication, what information to share, and whom to inform.
How Task Communications Management works
With Task Communications Management, you can predefine a communication plan for an event such as major incident, planned maintenance, and release. Each plan generally involves a series of tasks that define different communication and collaboration activities along with frequency and method of communication. For each task, you must specify the communication channel for contacting the stakeholders. You can also define templates for email and SMS messages.
After defining the task and channel for communication, you can define the contacts or the target audience to be contacted for each task.
After a communication plan is defined, the plan gets associated with the appropriate task table based on the conditions defined. Thereafter, the tasks defined in the plan get executed sequentially and stakeholders are contacted as defined in the plan. The communication plan makes communication and collaboration process smoother and brings a quicker resolution of the issue.
Task Communications Management flow in major incident management
Assume that you want an incident communication plan generated for a high-priority major incident.- As the major incident manager, you can predefine a communication plan and the conditions that drive its attachment. In this case, the conditions are: Priority = High and Major Incident state = Accepted. Consider that the target audience is the technical stakeholders of the incident and the communication plan definition is named Technical Communications.
- The plan definition can have multiple communication task definitions such as:
- Initiate Technical Communications
- Technical Status Update
- Each communication task definition also specifies the channel of communication and the
communication frequency (one time or recurring).
- Initiate Technical Communications uses email as a channel of communication and communication frequency is one time.
- Technical Status Update uses email and SMS as channel of communication and the communication frequency is recurring.
- The target audience for in the communications is defined as communication contact definitions on the plan definition. In this case, consider Service owners of the affected configuration items (CIs) related to the incident as technical stakeholders.
- When an incident meets these conditions, an incident communication plan together with its tasks gets attached to the incident record.
- As the major incident manager, you can effectively carry out the communication without any delay in the resolution of the major incident.
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