Master the service catalog and

request management process

Get on track with a stellar service catalog and request management process

Introduction
This process guide is a detailed explanation of how you can use the the service catalog and
request management process within the Now Platform ®.

Service catalog and request management process scope

Service catalog management involves:
• Creating the catalog and taxonomy
• Maintaining the service catalog
• Creating individually offered services and the fulfilment mechanism for each of them
• Modifying and retiring existing offerings
Request management involves:
• Approving overall requests, for example, by a line manager or financial controller
• Approving individual requested items, for example, by an IT hardware provisioning team
• Fulfilling all requests within the agreed delivery time frame

Service catalog and request management process objectives

When it comes to your organization’s service catalog and request management process, be
sure you:
• Make all users in your organization aware of the catalog and of how easy it is for them to
request services and product offerings
• Provide users with a consistent and repeatable process for requesting and fulfilling services to
ensure that their expectations are clearly set and continually met so you can maintain high
customer satisfaction levels
• Offer all new services in the catalog quickly—as soon as they become available
This process guide will help you create and maintain an effective service catalog and request
management process by:
• Defining the best process for service catalog management from creation to service
modification
• Defining the best process for request management from approval through fulfillment
• Explaining how to integrate other processes with service catalog and request management

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Regardless of your level of maturity with ServiceNow®, follow this guide as closely as possible. At
ServiceNow, we encourage using the same simple, lean ITSM processes that are reflected in our
out-of-the-box designs.
In this guide, you’ll find additional recommendations from ServiceNow Professional Services
beyond the specific out-of-the-box (OOTB) functionality. You may add additional functionality
to what’s offered, but you should only do so in scenarios when you will achieve a required
business outcome that can’t be achieved using an OOTB method. When you follow this
approach, your upgrade paths will be smoother, and you’ll be better able to expand your use
of the Now Platform.

B EFORE YOU START , YOU NEED:

• To define a clear set of measures of success for the service catalog
• To understand that service catalog design is not a project but an ongoing process

Terms and definitions

Service catalog – A service catalog is a listing all IT services offered to the business. It allows users
to browse or search the offerings and request them in the same manner as an online shopping
experience. A service catalog includes a shopping cart where users can create a list of all the
items they want to request before they submit the request by checking out.
Request management – Request management is the process that immediately follows the
submission of a request from the service catalog. It includes the approval of the overall request
and/or the individual requested items and the subsequent fulfilment of them.

Figure 1: The service catalog and request management process

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and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Roles and responsibilities
Process owner
The process owner owns and maintains the service catalog and request management process.
This person is typically a senior manager with the ability and authority to ensure the team
implements the process and that all stakeholders follow it.

Responsibilities
• Define the overall mission of the process.
• Establish and communicate the process’s mission, goals, and objectives to all stakeholders.
• Document and maintain the process and procedures.
• Resolve any cross-functional (departmental) issues.
• Ensure proper staffing and training for execution.
• Direct the service catalog and request management roles.
• Ensure consistent execution of the process across the organization.
• Monitor, measure, and report on the effectiveness of the process to senior management.
• Continually improve the process.
ServiceNow role – There is no required role in ServiceNow—this is a functional role that supports
the process.

Catalog manager
The catalog manager’s purpose is to ensure changes to the service catalog are controlled and
to provide a method for efficiently resolving service catalog issues.

Responsibilities
• Manage the day-to-day activities of the process, and document the operating procedures
that support the activities.
• Assign tasks to catalog editors for execution.
• Coordinate interfaces between service catalog management and other processes.
• Record all operational services (and those being prepared) within the Service Catalog.
• Maintain appropriate views of the service catalog and make them available to those
they’re targeted for.
ServiceNow Role – The catalog_manager role is required.

Catalog editor
The catalog editor adds, modifies, and retires catalog items based on the the service owner's
and catalog manager’s approvals.

Responsibilities
• Create new catalog items and their associated workflows.

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• Modify existing catalog items.
• Retire obsolete catalog items.
ServiceNow role – Both the catalog_admin and catalog_editor roles are required.

Service owner
Each service must have a designated owner. The service owner is accountable for the delivery
of a specific IT service and is responsible to the customer for initiating, transitioning, and
providing ongoing maintenance and support of that service.

Responsibilities
• Create the service delivery method, including engaging and coordinating fulfillment teams.
• Ensure the service is delivered within the expected time frame and its cost is allocated to it.
• Approve requests against the service.
ServiceNow role – The itil role is required.

Requester
Requesters may be anyone in the organization with access to make requests, and they may
submit service requests on someone else’s behalf.
ServiceNow role – No role is required in ServiceNow for this, but requesters need a login.

Approver
Approvers are the line managers, service owners, and business stakeholders (such as financial
managers) responsible for reviewing request details and granting approval or rejecting the
requests. The actual number and type of approvals required depends on the individual request.
ServiceNow role – The approver_user role is required.

Fulfiller
Fulfillers are the people who are assigned to execute one or more specific tasks to fulfill the
service request.

Responsibilities
• Work on the activities with their assigned tasks.
• Update the tasks to reflect the current progress and provide detailed information to allow a
service desk agent to give the requester a progress update if required.
• Close tasks when they’re complete, along with closure information.
ServiceNow role – The itil role is required.

How requests are initiated

Directly in ServiceNow – A service desk agent can create a request, on a user’s behalf, directly
as a result of a phone call, email, or chat from that user.
Self-service – End users can use the self-service portal to create a request directly.

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Automatically via integrations – Certain requests can be automatically generated within the
virtual agent chatbot from Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Virtual Agent – A request can be created directly from a chat conversation.
Walk-Up Experience – By visiting the onsite IT support location, users can create a request using
the Walk-Up Experience interface.

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ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States
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Service catalog management process

Figure 2: The service catalog management process flow

Request and approve new services

When a new service is due to go live, you must first add it to the Service Catalog. The best
practice is to create a catalog item in the Service Catalog for the express purpose of allowing
service owners to request a new item be added to the catalog—it’s a catalog item to request a
catalog item. Users will need to provide details on:
• What service is being offered
• Who is allowed to request it
• What information must be collected from the requester in order to fulfil the request
• The delivery time scales
• Who should approve the request
• What tasks are required to fulfil the request
• Whether the tasks must occur in a particular sequence
• Which team should complete the tasks
Once you’ve submitted the request, route it to the catalog manager for review and approval.
When you’re requesting a very complex service, you may may not be able to document every
part of the requirement within the request itself, so the catalog manager may need to discuss
the service in greater detail with the service owner.

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Once the catalog manager is comfortable that the service is well understood and is appropriate
to include in the catalog, they can approve the request. At this point, assign a task to a catalog
editor to fulfill the request.

Create and publish new services

Now the catalog editor can create the catalog item. In most cases, the editor should create it in
a sub-production instance to ensure it can be fully tested before being made available in the
live catalog.
Catalog editors should follow this process when creating the catalog item:
1. Create the required variables, approvals, and catalog tasks.
2. Include the item in the most appropriate category and sub-category within the catalog.
3. Ask the service owner to fully test the service to ensure it behaves exactly as required and
that it can be made available in the live catalog. The editor should make any adjustments at
this point based on feedback from the service owner.
4. Once both are happy with the new service, the catalog editor can publish the new service
in the production service catalog.

Modify and retire services

Service owners should also raise a request when they need to make a modification to an existing
service or to retire one. Requesting to modify a service is very similar to requesting a new service.
The catolog editor follows this process:
1. Instead of creating a new item, make modifications to the existing item in a sub-production
instance unless the risk is very small—then it’s possible to do it in production.

Heads up!
Only do this if it’s a small change that won’t impact the workflow, like changing the category
the item is in.

2. Ask the service owner to test the item.

3. Publish the item to the production instance.

To retire an item, the catalog editor completes the action immediately in the production
instance.

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Request management process

Figure 3: The request management process flow

Request services
When you need something from your ServiceNow Service Catalog, like a particular hardware
item, search or browse for it in the catalog. When you find it:
1. Complete the required questions about the service within the service request.
2. If you’re only requesting one item, click the Order Now button to check out immediately.
3. If you’re requesting more than one service, click the Add to Cart button to hold your first
service in the cart while you add additional services.
a) When you’ve added all the services you need to the cart, click the Proceed to
Checkout button.
b) During checkout, you can enter additional overall information, including a shipping
address or special instructions. You can also edit the cart if you need to remove
something.
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 c) Click the Checkout button when you’re ready. Your request is created.

Request approvals
Next, you’ll seek any required approvals. Typically those held at the request record level are
generated first since a line manager approves the requests at that level.
Your request may require more than one approver. For example, the hardware item you
requested may require IT approval for its procurement and facilities approval for its placement.
Once each required approver receives your request and approves, your request can be fulfilled.
If any of the approvers reject the request—or an item within it—it’s marked as Closed Rejected,
and the requester receives an email notification that the request was rejected.

Request fulfillment
When a request is approved, the catalog tasks are created automatically. There may be several
of these per requested item that may occur sequentially or in parallel. Catalog tasks are
assigned to specific groups who will fulfill the requested item. For example, a specific group
within your IT department will receive a catalog task to deploy software or deliver hardware to
the requester.
The person in the group who receives the catalog task should:
1. Change the State field in the request to In Progress to make it clear that work has begun on
the task.
2. When the work is complete, set the State to Closed Complete unless the task could not be
completed.
3. If the work cannot be completed, select either Closed Skipped or Closed Incomplete.
Once all catalog tasks for the requested item are closed, the item (like deliving the hardware)
will be closed automatically. Once all items are closed (such as deploying the software and
delivering the hardware), the actual request can be closed. The requester receives notification,
and the process is complete.

Track requests
As you can see from the approval and fulfillment parts of the process, the request management
lifecycle may involve multiple groups and individuals. In order to provide a single point of
contact for the requester, the service desk is considered the owner of all requests—regardless of
who is actually responsible for fulfilling them.
Although there is an overall request record to track all of their requested items, most requesters
prefer to track progress against the record for each item since, in many cases, they can be
fulfilled independently of each other.

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Other processes
Incident management
It’s extremely common for ServiceNow customers to offer end users the opportunity to raise
incidents themselves using a self-service portal—usually along with the Incident Management
application. If your organization does, use the record producer to allow users to see an interface
that looks the same as a catalog item and that can be stored within the catalog as any other
offered service. The difference is that, once the incident is submitted, the record producer will
not raise a request with items and tasks as it does with other catalog items. Instead, it will
immediately generate a new incident record that will follow your normal incident process.
Many service requests may come from the service desk and may be initially handled through
the incident management process before they’re identified as service requests.

Change management
Standard changes are stored as templates within the Service Catalog through the Standard
Change Catalog plugin. Use these templates to create new standard changes with
prepopulated content.

Heads up!
Instruct users to create new changes from the standard change catalog—never directly from the
Service Catalog. This is because there’s a large amount of technical information required to create a
standard change. By using the standard change catalog, users raise a request to the team responsible
for implementing the change—and that team subsequently raises a change record for the work.

Configuration and asset management

With the Configuration Management and Asset Mangement applications, you can use
information about asset and configuration item (CI) attributes in various catalog items that
initiate service requests. You can trigger updates to certain asset and CI attributes—such as
those for software license counts—from a service request.

Service level management

When you use ServiceNow Service Level Management, it defines the fulfilment targets for your
various types of service requests.

Process governance
Measurement
Key performance indicators (KPIs) evaluate the success of a particular activity toward meeting
its critical success factors. You can successfully manage KPIs either by repeatedly meeting an
objective (maintaining the KPI) or by making progress toward an objective (increasing or
decreasing the KPI).
The Benchmarks feature in ServiceNow gives you instant visibility into your KPIs and trends, as well
as comparative insight relative to your peers’ industry averages. You can contrast the
performance of your organization with recognized industry standards, and view a side-by-side

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and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
comparison of your performance with global benchmarks. Benchmarks offers the following ITSM
KPIs:
• % of closed requests with breached SLAs
• Average time to fulfil a request
• Number of requests created per user

Metrics
Process KPIs
Process KPIs provide information on the effectiveness of the process and the impact of
continuous improvement efforts, and they are:
• Best represented as trend lines and tracked over time
• Monitored by the process owner

Item Purpose

Number of new catalog items This is an indicator of your service catalog’s accuracy
delivered into the live and new services’ growth.
environment per month

Number and percentage of This data measures how effectively your service request
service requests completed within SLAs are achieved.
agreed target times
Table 1: Some process KPIs and their purpose

Operational data
Track active catalog items and requests that require visibility, oversight, and possible
management intervention on a dashboard or homepage that is monitored by the service desk
and request fulfilment team.

Item Purpose

List of generic requests that have A periodic review and analysis of your generic requests
been submitted may reveal opportunities to improve your service
catalog’s organization or to identify new services and/or
catalog items you should add.

Ageing of open service catalog You’ll see a list view of the request items with values
item review tasks against each item. One of those is the due date, which
allows you to determine ageing requests by open
requested items on a due date.

List of open requests that have You’ll see a list of open requests that have breached SLAs
exceeded target times and need immediate attention.

Pie chart of service request This data is presented as a quick view of those fulfilment
backlog by type areas that need improvement (with the ability to drill
down).

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 List of open requests that have You’ll see a list of all open requests that have breached
exceeded target times SLAs and need immediate attention.
Table 2: Some operational KPIs and their purpose

Reports and dashboards

There are numerous default reports available in ServiceNow that you can use to generate
charts, publish to a URL, or schedule to run and distribute at regular intervals. You can also
create custom reports.
To help your users understand how to prioritize work, give them access to dashboards that
provide live information about the records they are assigned to or are responsible for.

The takeaway
Keep these things in mind as you move forward with service catalog and request management:
• The catalog is there to provide a consumer-like experience to its users, so it should be easy to
navigate.
• When you provide visibility of the request fulfillment process through self-service, it saves time
for both the user and the company.
• Changing your users’ behavior to use a service catalog is important when you introduce one
for the first time, and it’s key to driving adoption.
• Manage the items in the catalog close to the business so that they stay relevant, but provide
overall governance of the catalog to keep consistency.
• Avoid repeated items and general sprawl.

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ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States
and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.