One cool new process that Service Manager now supports is Service Request Management/Fulfillment. In Service Manager 2010 you had to use Incidents or Change Requests to address Service Requests – or you built a complete new Work Item type from scratch. It’s much easier now as Service Request is a Work Item than comes out of the box and allows you to separate Requests for Service from Incidents and Changes.
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The complete SCSM SM12 (Beta) Series:
#1 – Service Level Objectives (SLO)
#2 – Service Requests
#3 – Automation of Service Requests
#4 – Enable Self-Service for Service Requests
#5 – Parent/Child Incidents
#6 – Release Management
#7 – Connectors
#8 – Permissions for triggering System Center Orchestrator runbooks
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First let’s take a look where you find the new Service Requests.
Now, to implement Service Requests you first should prepare appropriate Service Request templates that have some preconfigured settings ans also reflect the business process for your Service Requests types. So lets first create a new template and choose “Service Request” as the class this template is used for.
After the form opens you can configure the template as needed, In this example I create a template for ordering/creating new ADDS user objects. I only define few values here.
Now comes the most interesting part, the activities tab. This is where your business process is reflected with several activities. You can add different kind of activities in the needed order – this is almost the same as with Change Requests in Service Manager 2010. But wait, what’s that? The interface looks completely new and there are new types of activities available? Yes! This is one of the most important new features that now allows you to use parallel, sequential or dependent activities to build your process.
To demonstrate I add a review activity and a parallel activity that contains to parallel manual activities. Let’s see how this looks like – wow, pretty cool!
Now after the template is ready it’s time to create a new Service Request based on the new template. When switching to “Service Request Fulfillment” you should see a task named “Create Service Request from Template”. The template prepared before should be visible.
A new Service Request is created that can now be configured with all the details you need. Don’t forget to configure the activities with all the needed details so that the technicians that get an activity to work on have all the information they need.
After the Service Request is created it is displayed in the Service Request views. After a short time, the business process workflow engine will recognize that a new Service Request has been created and will then put the first activity to the status “In Progress” and allows the technician to work on it. From here, it’s almost the same as with Change Requests in Service Manager 2010. As soon as the last activity is marked as completed, the Service Request itself changes it’s status to “completed”.
It’s possible that you have defined Service Levels for Service Request types. To make sure you can measure the Service Levels and do some reporting, it’s possible to use different kinds of Service Level Objectives together with Service Requests. For more information how this works, check this blog post –> http://blog.scsmfaq.ch/2011/10/27/news-in-scsm12-beta-1-service-level-objectives-slo/
This is pretty cool stuff, but wait, it gets even more exciting! Why not give end users access to Service Request Templates so that they can directly create Service Requests on their own? And why not automate the process to configure things? Wow, even this is possible with Service Manager 2012. I will cover these things in the next blog posts, so stay tuned!
regards
Marcel