Overview
The nuances for onboarding a team or group in ServiceNow are a little different for everybody, but the overall steps are the same.
General
Step 1 - Know what you are trying to do.
What teams or groups are you trying to onboard? Why do you want them in the system? What will they be doing? What expectations do you have of them? What expectations do you have of the system?
Step 2 - First meeting!
Create a case in ServiceNow assigned to ITS-SNOW or fill out the 'Contact ServiceNow Team' form and say you are interested in onboarding a new group. Give us some background - who you are, who they are, what they do, and what your hopes for the system are.
Once we get that ticket, we'll reach out and schedule a meeting to learn more about the use case and make sure it's a good fit. It usually is, but sometimes our expectations don't match or certain capabilities aren't there for you.
We'll remind you there's a small recharge per month per agent. It's currently at $35.50.
Step 3 - Fill out the onboarding template.
During our first meeting, we'll present you with an onboarding template. This spreadsheet is where you will fill in all of the details of your team members and other configuration details like categorization and email intake. We will meet again to review it after you have filled it out.
It has 4 tabs that go over the details of what we need.
- Organization Information -
- What organization do you want to be listed in? ServiceNow is organized around what audience are you helping or what type of systems are you helping them with. When we say 'Organization' it is not bureaucratic or UC wide. It is more functional. Our most common organizations are listed on the portal at https://support.ucsd.edu/services.
- What organization do you want to be listed in? ServiceNow is organized around what audience are you helping or what type of systems are you helping them with. When we say 'Organization' it is not bureaucratic or UC wide. It is more functional. Our most common organizations are listed on the portal at https://support.ucsd.edu/services.
- Group Information -
- The next step is to tell us what agents you want to be in the system. Assignment Groups are the collections of people that help answer questions in the system. The people who answer questions are called 'Agents', 'Agent Fulfiller', or 'Fulfiller'. Groups should be collected around a shared application or type of support provided. We generally discourage assignment groups with fewer than 3 people. It's better to have one group that does 'All ServiceNow Stuff' versus three groups split up with specialties like 'Only ServiceNow New Requests', 'Only ServiceNow Billing', and 'Only ServiceNow Troubleshooting'.
- Service and Service Offering Information -
- Service and Service Offerings are one of the more nuanced parts of the system. Services are broader functionalities that a team provides to their customers. For software support, this is often the broader market of what the software does - for instance, ServiceNow the application is a 'Case Management Systems', so that is our Service. If there were other case management systems at UC San Diego, we would put them in the same Service.
- Service Offerings are more specific breakdowns of what support is being provided. Specifically the software being supported or type of support being provided.
- Inbound Case Creation Information -
- There are three ways to create tickets for agents to answer 1) a portal form, b) an agent can create a ticket directly in the agent view, c) an email can be sent to a specific email address. If you want to create an inbound email that always creates a ticket to one of your groups, this is where we'd get that information from you. It can be an existing email address or a new email address. If it is an existing email address, we'll ask you if it's ok to delete all the emails that are currently in that mailbox.
Step 4 - Second meeting!
Once the template is mostly filled out, let us know and we'll schedule a second meeting to review it. The ServiceNow team will review each tab and talk through what is entered. We'll make sure we have PTF to recharge agents. We'll make sure the organization and group selection is logical and inline with our expectations. We'll talk through the Service, Service Offering, and Categories and make sure they are unique to the system and easily understandable to customers and agents. If an email is requested, we'll make sure we understand your desired timing and transition plan. Once it's reviewed, the ServiceNow team will accept and finalize the template and begin work. We'll keep you posted on progress and a timeline.
Step 5 - Portal forms.
There are times you'll want to go live with a portal form and other times where you've already gone live and want to request a portal form by itself. If you want to go live with an intake form as part of the onboarding process, please let us know. There are separate conversations and documents for this process, but it follows roughly the same steps.
- We ask you to know what you're looking for.
- We meet.
- We give you some homework.
- We meet again as a handoff from you to us..
- We build the thing.
- You test it and we go live.
We have a wide variety of integrations and APIs available and the list is always growing.
Step 6 - Go live.
We are happy to work with you on timelines. Aside from our team creating custom forms for you, most of the onboarding wait time is generally in your hands while you fill out our documents.
Once the second meeting is completed, we'll work on creating the new groups and services for you. Once we've built out what you've requested, we'll send you a note to test in our QA/Test instance of ServiceNow. Once you've looked at the items in QA, we'll ask you sign off with a 'This looks great I think we're ready to go live' and then we'll go live!
We require all new agents to watch an agent training video, which is available on a link on our portal under the ServiceNow 101 Introduction page. After the new agents watch the video, we can schedule a followup training / practice session if desired. This is usually 30-60 minutes and reviews how to assign, re-assign, and close tickets.
We only release on Wednesdays, so your team(s) will be live on a Thursday morning. If you prefer to launch on a Monday, we recommend launching the Wednesday before and then doing communication and any change management on that Monday.
If you are launching a new IT Service group or service, we will ask you to present at CAB before your desired go live date.
Step 7 - Ongoing maintenance.
Ongoing maintenance is largely covered by the assignment group managers and the service offering managers.
There is 'Group Management' form in our portal that allows
There are 'Service Offering Management' forms in our portal that allow the offering manager - and only the offering manager - to request a new Service Offering or edit or retire an existing one. Likewise, we have a form for the offering manager to create new categories and sub-categories that are related to that offering.
We encourage you to look at all of our forms to get familiar with what you can and can't do in without creating a case.
We are always happy to answer questions that come in. We also hold a monthly office hours on the third Thursday of every month at 10am PST at https://ucsd.zoom.us/my/servicenowteam that is well worth your time to come to. We answer any question that comes up as well as talk about features of the platform.
If you still have questions or need additional assistance, please use the 'Contact ServiceNow Team' form.