SERVICENOW PROBLEM MANAGEMENT EXAMPLE

An employee is facing issues with the HR System. He/she created an incident, it was soon fixed by an IT specialists. A daily workflow was restored, but precious time was lost.

The consequences could have been even worse: say, the employee had to prepare a report for a management meeting, or make an informed decision based on the data from the system, etc. But that was not the end of the story. The next morning, and the day after, everything repeated again, and not only with this employee, but with some of the colleagues as well.

This example gives a clear idea of how the situation develops if the company practices only incident management. Besides, if IT specialists have a number of incidents as their KPI, they might focus on processing the incidents, without trying to identify and fix the root causes.

It goes without saying that incident management is important. However, the ability to define a root cause through structured problem analysis followed by documenting solutions and workarounds in the knowledge base allows solving deeper problems systematically. This means that problem management software helps reduce the quantity of incidents, which improves workflow efficiency.

In addition to a reactive approach, when IT specialists identify and aim to solve the problems leading to the incidents that have already happened, a proactive approach is also possible. In other words, problem management allows defining and solving a problem well in advance, before it causes any incident.

SERVICENOW'S SOLUTION

There is no process with no challenges to solve. Let’s see the problem management procedure and how

Investing additional efforts

A business has to invest efforts to set up a process flow for problem management. When this is done, IT team will have to continuously analyze every incident and link it to a problem. Searching for an answer, compare these efforts with those needed to fix recurring similar incidents. If configured properly, ServiceNow helps to reduce the number of incidents, and consequently, increase efficiency, improve service quality and enhance user satisfaction.

Binding incidents to a Problem

What if a problem manager or a service specialist overlooked an existing problem and created a duplicate? Should the team spend extra efforts to solve the same problem twice? ServiceNow has automated tools (for instance, BSM Visualization and CMDB baseline history) based on algorithms and business rules that help to avoid duplicates by prompting the existing problems or known errors from the database.

Identifying when to create a Problem

After an incident is solved or when several similar incidents have occurred, In ServiceNow, a problem can be created while an incident is being fixed or after the incident is solved.

To understand that the incidents are similar, a combination of approaches can be used: experience and competence of the IT team, agile search in the Known Error Database and Configuration Management Database, as well as automated tools like BSM Visualization.

There is no problem if different IT specialists process incidents, as while typing a problem description they can check whether there is any related information in the knowledge base.

Adding it Up

ITIL problem management is a step beyond incident management. The process aims to manage the life cycle of problems. Thanks to problem management, a company gains such benefits as increased efficiency, minimized negative effects and enhanced user satisfaction. In addition, the process allows a proactive approach, aimed at preventing incidents.

Although some problem management challenges exist, for example, investing additional efforts, binding incidents to a problem and identifying when to create a problem, ServiceNow provides the capabilities to solve them.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT

In modern IT, change management has many different guises. Project managers view change management as the process used to obtain approval for changes to the scope, timeline, or budget of a project. Infrastructure professionals consider change management to be the process for approving, testing, and installing a new piece of equipment, a cloud instance, or a new release of an application.

In the scope of ITIL change management, the term ‘change’ defines a process of altering something in a company’s IT processes or infrastructure that affects IT services. ITIL has a whole bunch of terms and best practices that are supposed to improve your ITSM change management. And it’s all very well in theory, but are all of ITIL change management dogmas applied in practice? The best way to see it is through analyzing ITSM platforms. And ServiceNow, being ITSM system #1 on the market, can help us with that.

Types of changes

ITSM change management can’t function properly without differentiating changes, which is why ITIL highlights three major types of changes:

Standard change
Emergency change
Normal change

Standard changes (SC) are frequently repeated low-risk alterations in IT processes or infrastructure that are easy, preapproved and skip a number of change process stages. Usually, it is easier for IT service managers to regard standard changes as such, to spare time for more arduous matters. If they processed SCs like normal changes, the overall change management would become too slow. An example of an SC would be adding a new switch to a network cabinet.

Emergency changes (EC) are alterations that require immediate attention. For instance, an email server does not respond. This issue disturbs the work of many users and requires action right away. The emergency change in this case would be adding more memory to the non-responsive server.

Normal changes (NC) are those that categorize as neither standard nor emergency. NCs are regarded as changes that can pose a particular threat to IT services but there’s no need to act on them immediately. For example, changing the default route on a server.

Change management roles

Roles are one of the pillars ITSM change management stands on. ITIL defines the following change management roles:

Change initiator - someone who sees the need for a change and begins the change management process.
Change manager - someone who assesses a change, works out its implementation plan and monitors the overall change process.
Change advisory board/CAB - a group of people who closely examine high-risk changes, authorize and review them.
Change implementer/tester - someone who actually implements and tests the change.

Additionally, ITIL recognizes the possibility that the customer’s representative may also participate in the process (as a change approver).

Concerning the implementation of ITIL change management in ServiceNow, so far, it complies with all the types of changes, their definitions and use. Besides, it allows to create your own types of changes to make the change process more suitable for your company. And using Standard change catalog provides a possibility to manage standard changes even more effectively: create, approve, manage SC templates and optimize change management process.

Delegating

Delegating in ServiceNow can be characterized in the following way:

Such roles as initiator, manager, implementer and tester are almost not differentiated. They exist within one change management process, but there’s no rigid demand that a particular task be delegated to a particular employee, who can, for instance, only implement or test the change. It might make the process more dynamic but at the same time too hectic.
Concerning CAB roles, ServiceNow has a special application for its activity, CAB workbench. It helps to schedule CAB meetings, appoint attendees, define agenda and monitor the process on the whole.

Change Life cycle

Change management process in ITIL can be seen somewhat bureaucratic. First, we identify the need for a change and create a change request. Then, the change gets carefully assessed, reviewed, planned and tested (you verify if everything works OK). Only after that a change proposal can be created. If, based on such a proposal, the change gets authorized, we can proceed with implementation, post-implementation review and closure.

But we should bear in mind that the full-cycle change process (as shown above) is characteristic only of the normal change. Standard and emergency changes skip particular stages to make their implementation process quicker.

The overall process looks quicker and less ‘bureaucratic.’The lifecycle is similar to ITIL, but with a couple of exceptions:

Change requests and change proposals aren’t differentiated.
There is an additional option to cancel a change.
Testing takes place only at the last but one stage, when the staff has already performed all necessary implementation activities. It can make the process more ‘light-weight’, but if there’s less preparation before real action, it can get risky.

In addition, ServiceNow enables its users to add new change states, alter change workflows and tailor state transition criteria. You can also relate needed incidents, problems, tasks, configuration items, impacted services to the change form so that you have everything in one place. Besides, when you close a change, all associated incidents/problems are also closed automatically.

The Result

ServiceNow change management has a couple of debatable points. Firstly, it doesn’t specify these roles: initiator, manager, implementer and tester. Secondly, change preparation seems insufficient (there’s no testing stage before implementation). However, these points don’t seem extremely crucial and can’t affect your change management that much.

Our verdict is that ServiceNow does provide quite a good change management ‘venue.’ Here’s why:

In terms of ITIL-specified types of change, change management roles and change lifecycle, ServiceNow largely complies with core ITIL aspects.
It allows a lot of flexibility to companies who need to tailor change management to meet their needs. They can create their own change types, add new change states, define other workflows for every change type and alter state transition criteria.
There is a possibility to monitor change-related performance with the help of ServiceNow reporting and such KPIs as number of unsuccessful changes, backlog of changes and carried out emergency changes.

And given that ServiceNow change management is indeed worthy, it can be a good tool to prevent your IT processes from falling like dominos.

ServiceNow Performance Analytics and Reporting

ServiceNow Performance Analytics is an in-platform process optimization solution to create management dashboards, report on KPIs and metrics, and answer key business questions to help increase quality and reduce the costs of service delivery.

ServiceNow Reporting vs. Performance Analytics

According to our experts, Reporting is an OOTB ServiceNow plugin that allows making reports on data in the system. The report takes data from a particular table and makes a chart to display what you need.

Performance Analytics (PA) is also a ServiceNow OOTB plugin that provides data collection, analysis and visualization. However, OOTB PA is only for Incident Management.

Portfolio, financial, change, request, event management, etc., are available with ServiceNow Premium PA.

ServiceNow reporting functionality and Performance Analytics differ immensely in their approach. The key difference is continuity and data collection.

Performance of an IT department is like heart rate. to make a report there needs to be a heart-rate checkup at a doctor’s office. It would show the current state of your heart rate as you’ll have access only to the current data

Performance Analytics is just like a medical Kit ‘attached’ to your IT department throughout all its activities, basically its a way to measure the IT department’s performance. it not only monitors only the IT’s performance constantly. It also collects the metrics, analysis, compares and visualizes a in an understandable format, identifying trends and making forecasts the future IT requiremnents.

With the constant monitoring and data collection ServiceNow PA can provide new levels of insights. like:

Analyzes the real trends after comparing data from different intervals.
View forecasts and act on them before any real damage occurs.
Continuously counter the bottlenecks and improve the IT Services.
Automates scheduling activities, automation of report delivery and analyze the needed parameters.

The ServiceNow PA follows a different process

ServiceNow admins define indicator sources, which are the places (in tables) where data will be extracted from.
Determine indicators, which are the ‘I’ in KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), for instance, average open age. ServiceNow PA has 3 groups of indicators: automated (for long periods of data collection), manual (for specific historical data) and formula (for calculations and manipulations with the previous two). Data collected for one indicator over time results in a series of indicator scores, which display data extracted from a particular table at regular intervals.
IT specialists set up breakdown sources to make sure that you get the results you need when you look at data broken down by a different element (average open age broken down by the ticket’s priority, for example).
For these purposes, specialists run data collection jobs. They can be historical (with past data) and ongoing (with new data). This way, indicators get ‘filled’ with their true essence – scores (the data itself).
PA regularly documents the IT department’s performance data (or heart rate), analyzes the difference between intervals and shows real changes in performance. Whereas Reporting can only show you what the tables have stored in them now.

What is the need for ServiceNow PA

In brief, ease of Operational Management is through Reporting. Reporting checks the current situation and react on current problems. PA is, however, used for strategic management. It displays the bigger picture and analyze performance behind everyday activities. if Strategic Management is the organizations requirement, then ServiceNow PA may be ideal. If not, reporting does the needed job.

Due to collecting data at regular intervals, analyzing and forecasting trends, ServiceNow Performance Analytics allows new levels of in-depth insights into the IT. But it may be be expensive. Your needs may be fully covered by Reporting, if your level of ITSM maturity doesn’t require a strategic analysis of IT performance. Besides, if your company has already invested a lot into BI, the pros and cons of using PA must be double checked, which is something ServiceNow consulting can help you with.

ASSET MANAGEMENT

IT asset management (also known as ITAM) is the process of ensuring an organization’s assets are accounted for, deployed, maintained, upgraded, and disposed of when the time comes. Put simply, it’s making sure that the valuable items, tangible and intangible, in your organization are tracked and being used.

So, what’s an IT asset? Defined simply, an IT asset includes hardware, software systems, or information an organization values. In Atlassian’s IT department, some of our most important assets are the computers and software licenses that help us build, sell, and support our software and the servers we host it on.

IT assets have a finite period of use. To maximize the value an organization can generate from them, the IT asset lifecycle can be proactively managed. Each organization may define unique stages of that lifecycle, but they generally include planning, procurement, deployment, maintenance, and retirement. An important part of IT asset management is applying process across all lifecycle stages to understand the total cost of ownership and optimize the use of assets.

Why is IT Asset Management

Too often, assets get tracked in a ton of different places, by a ton of different people. No single person owns things, and no single tool collects and centralizes the information. Naturally, chaos and inaccuracy follow. It’s difficult to make informed decisions. There are even companies where people are being employed just to keep track of IT assets. Systems should do this work. Without having to relegate time and brain matter to tracking artifacts, monitoring usage, and understanding dependencies, IT employees can focus more on what matters most to the organization. Asset management brings order, and offers a single source of truth for IT teams, management, and ultimately, entire organizations.

IT Asset Management (ITAM) presupposes monitoring asset usage and count, providing timely asset maintenance, tracking the total cost of ownership (TCO), managing the asset life cycle and so on. And the difference from enterprise-wide asset management is that most of ITAM procedures mirror core IT specifics of asset planning, deployment, maintenance, and support. This allows IT departments to manage IT assets on a much deeper level than enterprise asset managers ever could. It leads to cutting IT-related costs more efficiently and bringing financial visibility into IT operations.

Why you need asset management software

As reliance on software, infrastructure, and platform services continues to increase, one of the keys to cutting costs is optimizing spending on these services. According to Gartner research, “many organizations can cut spending on software by as much as 30 percent” using best practices to optimize software licenses. This isn’t an easy task to complete manually. Gartner writes “Optimizing complex licenses manually is labor-intensive; it requires specialized knowledge and does not scale. Larger enterprises will need a ITAM tool. A ITAM tool can automate, accelerate and improve manual processes. It can pay dividends over manual alternatives, and can often pay for itself.”

Keep up with the pace of change in your company

Spreadsheets are still one of the most the most common ways that companies start tracking what they own. Think they stay accurate very long? No way. They quickly become inaccurate or unwieldy. In fact, Sage Accounting found that a $2 million company using spreadsheets to track their assets could be spending as much as $50,000 a year on “ghost assets,” or items that they are paying and accounting for in their general ledger but that are physically missing.

Five new headsets arrived today. Four employees had their laptops stolen at a restaurant in Hyderabad. Next month, ten printers are getting switched out with new models from the leasing company, and the month after that, 14 laptops. If you need an employee - even part time - to keep track of everything, you need a basic system to make the job easier.

Last but not least

ServiceNow documentation, marketing materials and third-party YouTube demos scattered across the internet do their best to explain the specifics and value of ServiceNow Asset Management. However, you may have a hard time trying to systemize your understanding of ServiceNow Asset Management after consulting these sources. Luckily, our ServiceNow implementation consultants share everything there is to know about ServiceNow Asset Management in one place and a simple form.