ServiceNow Incident Tasks
ServiceNow Incident Tasks are used for resolving incidents. Using the Incident management process, you can ensure that your business services are restored as quickly as possible.
When you create a new incident task, you are given the option to select a severity priority and impact. These metrics are important to determine who is responsible for resolving the problem.
Requirements
A ServiceNow incident is a record in the ServiceNow database that represents an incident, request, task, or problem. Each record has a specific identifier in ServiceNow and in emails that are generated by ServiceNow.
Incidents have a business impact, so they should be addressed as quickly as possible. This requires a system to identify the incident by the cause of the issue, track the progress and determine who is responsible for resolving it.
In order to ensure that the right group is assigned to resolve the problem, service desks usually create a task with an Assignment Group and Assigned To field. However, splitting incidents into tasks can be a disadvantage because it can make it difficult to communicate with multiple groups who have different roles in resolving the same incident.
Moreover, Incident Tasks may not convey the level of urgency that a task should have, which could be an important factor in ensuring the incident is resolved as soon as possible. To combat this, the ServiceNow platform has added new features that can help security teams customize the incident response service.
Prioritization
When triaging incidents, service desk analysts use a priority matrix to prioritize work based on impact and urgency. A scale of one to five has been commonly used, with one being a “critical” incident and five a minor request.
This helps them assess the severity of each incident and triage it appropriately in line with business needs. The number of levels in the priority matrix should be a minimum of five to maximize the effectiveness of the process.
However, the number of levels that a company uses depends on many factors. For example, a smaller set of classification levels may be better for the purpose of major incident management, while a larger number might be needed for request management to drive new technology across the organization.
Assigning the correct group to an incident task is essential for speed of resolution. The Assignment Group and Assigned to fields on the Incident Tasks form convey this importance.
Assigning Tasks
Once an incident is logged, ServiceNow assigns it to a Task based on its impact and urgency. The Impact value indicates the potential damage a service can cause, and Urgency is a measure of how long it takes for an incident to disrupt services.
If you have properly related CIs and Groups according to the Common Service Data Model (CSDM), auto-assignments work smoothly. Likewise, when you have the task and SLA in the same view, it helps boost efficiency and effectiveness of the service desk.
This feature can be quite useful for ensuring clarity of overall responsibility and assigning child tickets to responsible persons and groups based on the underlying service configuration. However, you must ensure that the CMDB is populated according to the CSDM.
Tracking Tasks
An Incident is an unplanned interruption in business or a problem that may be caused by network, hardware, software, applications etc. It can be logged through email, phone calls, walk-in, web forms published on the self-service portal or through live chat messages.
ServiceNow has a powerful reporting functionality to help organizations measure, report and influence the factors that impact resolution times. In recent releases, ServiceNow has added Machine Learning capabilities that correlate incident descriptions to the most likely Assignment Group for automatic ticket assignment.
In addition, many organizations use Incident Tasks to assign ticket handling to different teams while maintaining the overall responsibility of the incident in Service Desk. While this is not part of the CSDM model, we have found it works well.
In addition to tracking time on a task, you can also track parts and labor costs on an incident, problem, change, or request. For example, if the change involves a new server, you can add the total cost of the server and technician used in the task to the Incident.
