Is ServiceNow really this inconvenient to use for everyone, or is it just our implementation?

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xtrabeanie@reddit

At the first company I worked for that used it, it was great but that had spent over 12 months customising it before roll out. I never understood the hate for it. But everywhere after that has been terrible. I had taken what I thought to be basic functionality for granted.

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Pristine-Section4977@reddit

Can only use SNOW in fufure. God bless.

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Pristine-Section4977@reddit

My company used Remedy before. I already though its rubbish. After used SNOW, I start missing Remedy. Bad design and management. Maybe the promotion PPT slidshow looks very professional to atttact managers. But its just rubbish for end users.

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

We had Remedy at a previous workplace ("tt.domain.com", some of you might guess which company this is). At least Remedy loaded pretty fast and didn't demand infinite refreshes every time I go to the bathroom, get a coffee or just space out on another tab.

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NadJ747@reddit

[**#ServiceNow**](https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?keywords=%23servicenow&origin=HASH_TAG_FROM_FEED) is dogshit. If you can only defend it by saying "It's that way because it wasn't implemented and isn't being managed correctly", then my answer to that (after hearing the same excuse over 10 times) is that's precisely what makes it dogshit. We didn't use this justification for other deeply embedded enterprise systems. I have worked at 10 companies where ServiceNow was in use for ticketing. Every single implementation bar one was crappy, lagging behind reality and a total pain to integrate with. In one environment, we asked the supplier to add 5 catalog items into the database. They said it would need 45 days work to include a PM and 3 technical resources and cost £67,500. In Topdesk, you can add them for free! The UI/UX, the speed, the random and haphazard way in which things are connected, the way you handle data imports/exports, the clunky and horrible way in which it interacts with directory systems especially for syncing users.... complete and utter dogshit.

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

10 companies with bad ServiceNow? Wow. If everyone implements it badly, then it sounds like the issue is too much liberties to customise. Instead of letting companies mess with the software too much, just make a UI that doesn't need so many customisations. Managers love adding more and more fields and menus and buttons, they're not the ones that have to fill out these endless forms. I've never done the kind of backend work you're describing, so I can't comment. But it sounds like the whole idea of getting an off-the-shelf product is that you don't have to spend 67k on messing with it.

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T0XICxN1GHTMAR3@reddit

Not being able to edit comments pisses me off to no end

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obamaforyourmama@reddit

You pretty much have to make your own Chrome Extension to fill out all the fucking drop downs unless you want decision fatigue by 10 am.

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

They blocked our ability to install any third party extensions on the corporate Windows laptops, sadly. When I wfh, I login from my personal Macbook sometimes (it's such a blessing - the corp laptop also blocks password saving too). But I don't think I can do that safely in the office.

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InternetMadeUsDumb@reddit

Snow is so bad that moving from connectwise to it signal handedly doubled my work load

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Curious-Session4119@reddit

Ah yeah this is super common with servicenow setups everywhere not just yours the whole triple ticket thing plus slow clunky workflows is like a meme at this point if you ever get a chance to suggest alternatives monday service is way smoother for these it workflows less headache and the interface is next level clean makes ticketing feel like it should in 2024 just throwing the idea out if your org ever reviews tools.

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

Yeah it's a quad-ticket rather than a triple ticket sometimes. Yesterday I had someone give me a CS0XXX, I had to turn it into a REQ0XXXX, RITM0XXX and then - finally - the SCTASK I could actually assign to self and work on. I never tried Monday, is it any better than this? I just want to stop wasting browser load time, you know.

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Sea_Bed1923@reddit

As an employee service now is horrible. It should never be used in a fast paced enviornment such as a hospitals which it is being used across the nation. We are directed to use service now for issues which require an instant fix. It generates service numbers and when you check back it behaves as if it solved your problem and starts a second ticket. It will not fix the issue or takes days to handle a situation that needed to be handled in minutes. It is a cause of extreme frustration in an already stressful workplace where lives are on the line.

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

Yes, the multiple tickets for the same thing is what confuses me and my end users the most. So much clicking and navigating. I still don't see the point. Why does a CS0xxxx need to turn into a REQ0xxxx, RITM0xxxx, SCTASK0xxxx. All of this just for a "please add 1 dns record for me, [www.hostname.com](http://www.hostname.com) = 10.20.30.40". I know some people here say they understand the logic behind all these tickets and sub-tickets, but I really don't think we should expect people to know that stuff when they contact tech support. I can't imagine what it's like when you're in a hospital situation, admin staff are probably low on time as is.

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mattberan@reddit

It's your implementation. ServiceNow is a platform so anything you don't like about it comes from an intentional decision from someone who implemented it. That's the reality of PaaS; your system can only be as good as you $pend.

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Additional-Simple248@reddit

I think I used to work at your company. My current employer has a much much better implementation.

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

Hey, that's actually possible, I see you're Australian too.

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Morkai@reddit

It's so weird bumping into so many ex-colleagues here! Another Aussie here with a shitty SNOW setup (though this was a former workplace for me)

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sydpermres@reddit

Add me to the list! Just lazy ass SNOW team with a never ending list of excuses.

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raptorshadow@reddit

Another Aussie who has dealt with multiple crappy SNOW implementations.

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spacelama@reddit

Possibly all our our SNOW implementation engineers are crappy, except that I've come across at least 1, possibly 2 (they all blend into one and I can't remember anything anymore. Hey, what day is it?) half-decent implementations in my travels, so they can't all be bad. They were universities, where the admin teams don't always have to bow down to stupid corporate mandates, and are given some freedom to do the needful.

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Mr_Mumbercycle@reddit

I'm in the U.S. and have been doing this for 20 years now. The best ticketing system I have ever worked with (first as a tech, then as a business analyst/WFM analyst) was an American University's implementation of Service Now. Didn't realize it at the time, but that shit became the gold standard I have judged every other ticketing system against since. It's probably not a coincidence that the in-house guy who built it out went on to be a CRM consultant.

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Additional-Simple248@reddit

I quite like our current implementation. But it took about two years of work before the entire support team migrated across. We have excellent implementation of response targets with different support levels, knowledge management, and more. My only complaints are around performance, but I’ve never seen a fast platform with our case volumes. My previous employer…. that was a very abrupt and unplanned migration because we had come in as an acquisition/merger and they wanted to stop paying for our previous ticket system ASAP. Yikes.

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BlackV@reddit

nz checking in, our shared instance is also garbage, and worse cause we have no rights in the system

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TinyBreak@reddit

Shit now I’m wondering if I work with either of you cause ours fuckin sucks too.

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No_MansLand@reddit

We had a whole team dedicated to just customizing it.. I hated it. Moved to another company who was with Connect-wise (Hated that too) and moved to Halo (not hating it as much) Also fellow Aussie

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IntergalacticWhy@reddit

Ditto. Our implementation is also terrible. Another fellow Aussie here.

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meldalinn@reddit

Hahahaha, my thoughts exactly - we just implemented SN over newyears, and I thought my life would get better, but its not

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Dynamatics@reddit

It's a good system but requires a lot of resources to get implemented "right". If you don't, it's a lot worse than any out of the box solution. > Made a change to incident 1 and hit 'save'? It automatically moves on to some other random incident 2 If you press "update", this happens. if you press save, this shouldn't happen, at least not in their cloud. REQ's are like a receipt from the grocerys tore. It's nothing more than "I ordered this". RITM's are the actual request item, like ordering a phone. Tasks are like, order phone, deliver phone, activate simcard. ALWAYS work from tasks. Ritms are owned by whoever is responsible getting you the phone and for communication to the customer only. > No easy batch-assignment of tickets in the queue Make a filter and set it as favorite. Sort by assigned to and double click the empty fields and type the first two letters of their name. Your dep might have disabled this. All your other points, completely valid.

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No_Dog9530@reddit

Exactly this

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HappyM0M@reddit

I work for an MSP that is a ServiceNow gold partner. We have an entire team whose job is just to maintain our ServiceNow implementation and keep it working. I agree with all your points except this one, and maybe I'm not understanding, or maybe our implementation is highly customised. > No easy batch-assignment of tickets in the queue We use line editing in a situation like this. I'm in Task Fulfillment so my team handles all the requests. When I come in each day, I find the tasks that have no EDD set. I use ctrl-click to select an entire column of EDDs to set and double click one of them to set/save the EDD. I do the same for the columns of Assignment Group and Category. I know this is a setting because I cannot do the same for OPRs. But maybe the OP can look into getting the line editing opened for some of their routine functions.

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Sufficient_Duck_8051@reddit

ServiceNow is the kind of software that makes me think that we should go back to resolving tickets via email. I hate how bloated, overcomplocated the UI is

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

I'd be totally okay with email-based tickets. In fact, I already have to push back against email requests as-is. Most people just DM or email me with their issues, and I'm expected to tell them to go lodge a ticket instead. But email is what they feel most comfortable with.

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dave-the-tech-man@reddit

I spent all day turning incidents into requests and vice versa. All because the end users don't know which form to use. Upside now the end users hate it.

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Odddutchguy@reddit

Our company made the mistake as well to customize ServiceNow to work as we used to work before ServiceNow. When we started 'IT' created almost 1000 items where the end user should choose from, mandatory. It's build for a proper ITIL service desk as point of contact for the user. User creates a ticket, the service desk should then triage and upcycle the ticket. Note how you can create a request from a incident (not vice-versa), create a change from a request. These tasks should be done by the service desk and next line support. We also made the mistake that the user should pick the correct of request so that it gets assigned to the correct queue and workflow immediately (which they always pick incorrect as they honestly don't know.) > No easy batch-assignment of tickets There is, you can select multiple and do a bulk update. BUT they need to be the same kind of tickets. You cannot do this from 'My groups Work' as that is Incidents, requests, change tasks grouped together. You can use (a filter on) 'all incidents', and select the ones you want to mass modify (as they are all incidents.)

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ThatOneIKnow@reddit

My favorite thin is, someone creates a new Change, clicks on "Submit" and is thrown back to some random overview. Many people think now it's submitted and can be approved etc. ServiceNO! The change is in Limbo and state is "New", you have to find it and click "Request Approval". Otherwise it will never be seen by anyone else. And on the other hand, there is no "Draft" or similar status. When I plan a change, it's always "New", I have to fill out ALL mandatory fields (even if I don't know the correct values yet)

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

I've learned the hard way to copypaste the CHG number into notepad \*before\* I hit 'submit', or else there's a chance I'll never find that CHG again and won't be able to assign it to myself. There's no draft status on anything there yeah. Also. If I need to edit a CHG after I hit 'submit', I'm not allowed to. We have a dedicated team called "change management" that we have to contact for any edits. They're not technical. They have nothing to add on that level. They exist mostly for these edits and bureaucracy around this process. This part might not be a servicenow issue tbh.

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Key-Brilliant9376@reddit

It was a decent system until they decided to make it so bloated and try to do everything. It makes what should be quite simple into something that is way too complex. You need to hire an entire team just to manage ServiceNow.

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ThatOneIKnow@reddit

Are you me? I have the same gripes with ServiceNo.

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NoCream2189@reddit

Service Now is like Sales Force - it works outa the box - but is not useful until you customise the feck out of it (at great cost) and if you get the customisation wrong…. IMHO - simple is better - that’s why I’ve stuck with Zendesk - yes I dont get some features or some reporting that I could get with a more complex system. But at the end of the day, open ticket, work on ticket, send emails to customers, close ticket when done - is really all that’s needed. also in IMHO - IT people love to over-engineer and over complicate things

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Speeddymon@reddit

> Service Now [...] - it works outa the box - but is not useful until you customise the feck out of it (at great cost) and if you get the customisation wrong… I agree with everything except for it being like SF because SF needs to die in a fire but I can live with SN

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brynx97@reddit

It's interesting. I got to witness ServiceNow rollout at two places, Cisco and federal gov't. It was god fucking awful at both. At Cisco, the teams literally spent 2 years gathering user stories...working with ServiceNow consultants and directly with ServiceNow, only for it to be terrible. I have no idea how it can be good. The UI/UX for it is plain awful. Dropdowns everywhere. You spend more time doing dropdowns. I also work with various 3rd parties that have ServiceNow, and their implementations are also awful. I use Zendesk at current work. I just wish the email formatting was better, although maybe our defaults aren't great. Their triggers and other functionality also "just makes sense", and they can be super useful. Searching for old tickets, even through millions of them, also great. ServiceNow search (at least 5 years ago)... might as well give up.

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darps@reddit

They published a big patch to ServiceNow search recently. It's even worse now! It now gives you a preview of a dozen "relevant" items, which seems to work worse than randomness because it always picks items from >5 years ago when I search for current events. You then have to click a small link to access the actual ticket search from before. I wish I was kidding.

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pdp10@reddit

> Dropdowns everywhere. You spend more time doing dropdowns than actual ticket work. That's typically a result of stakeholder demands, it's always seemed to me. They want highly-prescriptive inputs, but they also want a plethora of choices. I'm sure there are ways to improve it, with sensible defaults, and intelligent segmentation so that no one drop-down is too large.

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ls--lah@reddit

Agree. It gets to the point where you lose the "vision" of the ticket system just being "email with some helpful tracking and collab" to catrgorizing everything within an inch of it's life.

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pdp10@reddit

> catrgorizing everything within an inch of it's life. When I've seen this, the expressed goal was to auto-route the tickets with no need for human intervention.

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brynx97@reddit

The interesting part with one of the mega-ServiceNow deployments I saw was that this was goal #1. Ticketing automation. Except, they would have been far, far better served "solving" the problem upstream. Monitoring noise was excessive, but the SME's and teams that managed the monitoring platform and alerting configurations were laid off or outsourced. The end result was a constant flood of tickets where most of them could just be auto-closed. The chosen solution to solve this was to automate and/or auto-route tickets "optimally". So then we had metrics and KPI's for tickets being auto-closed etc, which were very high. Customers loved to see "how much work" we were taking off them. Upper management liked it. Me being a tier 3 / NOC engineer... everyone "on the ground" saw it for what it was.

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AbbeLabben@reddit

We use ServiceNow at my company and it sucks. All the managers say they like it because they can get their fancy looking reports with SLA, category etc, but what they don't understand is that no data in that report is accurate because the system is such a pain to work in that nobody ever categorises their tickets correctly. So far the best ticket system I've worked with is TOPDesk. It was simple and easy it to use.

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NoCream2189@reddit

although I use ZenDesk - i have a client who is rolling out ServiceDesk and want me to use it - so that they are using a global standard. Man when I sat in on the demo, all the managers where salivating over data this, data that… and I’m sitting there think to myself - so your going to seriously complicate everyone’s life (including your end users) to collect data nobody asked for and nobody really needs… fuck i hate been the only sane IT person in the room - actually fuck I just hate IT - i really need to get out

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deviden@reddit

> all the managers where salivating over data this, data that… and I’m sitting there think to myself - so your going to seriously complicate everyone’s life (including your end users) to collect data nobody asked for and nobody really needs… I fully believe that at the root of "why is per-capita productivity not improving along with all this new technology in Anglophone/western economies?" you'll find management culture as the cause. I've had great line managers, I've even worked under a couple of really good directors, but some weird shit starts happening when the management pyramid of an organisation accumulates a critical mass of managers interacting with other managers. Demonstrating that they are "objectively" improving the service requires metrics and targets, targets and metrics produce gamification, gamification means that the illusion (innocent or otherwise) of substantive improvement is just as useful as the real thing (and probably easier to achieve)... and if this stuff is allowed to continue unabated you eventually end up with a whole parallel world of work within the organisation that's not really *the productive work itself* any more. Large companies are like a small version of a state, and for the state to perceive people it must simplify and quantify the person into measurable stats. People talk about Orwell and 1984 but that MFer was way off imo. We live in Kafka's world, and like Kafka did you gotta learn to laugh at it.

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

\> I've had great line managers, I've even worked under a couple of really good directors, but some weird shit starts happening when the management pyramid of an organisation accumulates a critical mass of managers interacting with other managers. This is accurate. But I'd like to add, the mgmt in this scenario is often local and in-house, whereas the people doing the actual hands-on work are outsourced, offshore, contractors and generally there's no real investment in those technical departments. The big $$ goes to those making meetings and spreadsheets.

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Old_Layers@reddit

https://www.splunk.com/en_us/blog/learn/goodharts-law.html **Key Takeaways** * Goodhart's Law warns of distorted metrics when tied to goals: It states, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure," emphasizing how metrics can lose their effectiveness when manipulated to meet specific objectives. * The law highlights the risks of over-focusing on targets: Prioritizing specific metrics can lead to unintended consequences, such as gaming the system, neglecting broader goals, or sacrificing quality. * Balancing metrics with context is key: To avoid the pitfalls of Goodhart's Law, organizations should treat metrics as tools for guidance rather than rigid targets, ensuring they align with long-term objectives and core values.

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Lagkiller@reddit

Management whole strives for the data ServiceNow provides are generally the kind that don't know how to manage people and are trying to use technology to manage a people problem.

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

They only need 'data' because they don't know or understand our actual day-to-day work. They don't get the technology. They don't get what it's like to deal with users. They don't need data, they need a year of answering support calls.

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EmergencyFlounder845@reddit

Something I recently realized is that IT and management really don't go well together. You either work in IT and have to suffer from bad management (because it's either MBAs who don't understand tech or engineers who don't understand administrative work and planning), or you work outside IT and get somewhat qualified managers but less enjoyable daily work. I'm leaning more towards the latter these days because goddamn it's exhausting working with morons who can't see beyond their next bonus cycle

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

Part of the issue is that mgmt aren't people who were ever in the trenches with us. In a better universe, they would have started doing level 1 IT support and rose up slowly in the corporate ladder. Some do, but many aren't. They don't understand what we're dealing with, and what that one extra menu they add to our ticket system adds to my aggro levels.

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Relative_Hippo2549@reddit (OP)

\> all the managers where salivating over data this, data that… Ah yeah I worked for a FAANG like that once. Lots of managers managing each other, while the people doing the actual ticket work were mostly offshore in low-pay countries. We had Salesforce back then. They kept overloading our ticket with questions, categories, tags, drop down menus to select etc. I was level 3 support, so I was required to rate the previous agent 1-5 stars before I could close the ticket, select all the troubleshooting steps he used etc. Most of the options were completely irrelevant. Every time we had to close a ticket, we had to fill out all these boxes and select all the categories and stuff, so that mgmt would have "data" on support calls, the callers and the support agents' performance. Sometimes, managers added specific fields to our tickets and then left the company, but the field remained forever. In reality, we on;y had limited time and patience for all of this, so we just clicked random stuff to get through with it and move on to the next ticket. Any "data" they would have gathered this way would have been complete garbage. But I'm sure it made them feel very important. The best way to gather data and understand our work would have been them sitting with us and answering a few support calls themselves. But they were above that.

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CraigAT@reddit

They have learnt how to sell to management (pretty reports) - at the expense of everyone else's usability. Even though the stats are meaningless - requests and incidents are largely not comparable, because 1 ticket may require much more work than 20 other tickets. It's all too easy for everyone to pick off the low-hanging easy tickets.

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Yupsec@reddit

You mean ServiceNow, correct? Not Service Desk, the Jira product? Because I wish with every fiber of my being that I could convince the higher ups to go back to Service Desk, it was hands down the best ticketing system I've ever used...despite being attached to Jira.

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Otis-166@reddit

We call it service later. Thing is so slow and loads random pages after saving.

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Rhythm_Killer@reddit

I’ve seen that, whole teams dedicated to working on analysing ITSM data that is completely wrong.

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KingDaveRa@reddit

We're using TOPDesk (for the past few years now) - having used a couple of different ones, it's the best we've had. I certainly rarely complain about the software - just the content of the tickets instead 😁. We had Cherwell before, and it had been over-customised, by committee no less. It was a nightmare and I hated it. TOPDesk had light customisations, and we've done far more successfully with it.

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spetsny@reddit

I use Desk365. Awesome ticketing system. On the cloud, no on prem servers. I customized it on my own. Simple reports. No need for a huge PKI pileup.

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looperlupo@reddit

+1 for TOPdesk

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spacelama@reddit

Oh god I miss Request Tracker. THOU MUST NOT USE REQUEST-TRACKER! THAT IS NOT THE APPROVED STANDARD CORPORATE TOOL! THOU MUST USE THE APPROVED CORPORATE TOOL THAT DROPS YOUR CAREFULLY RESEARCHED UPDATE ON THE FLOOR WHEN YOU PRESS SUBMIT IF YOU HAVEN'T UPDATED ALL FIELDS WITHIN THE 5 MINUTE SESSION TIMEOUT. (Atlassian was actually an improvement on that when I moved to that new job)

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Fatality@reddit

Oh god the timeout, apparently ServiceNow recommends it as it's a "security issue".

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spacelama@reddit

SNOW never dropped mine on the floor - I don't recall the mechanisms. When I first came across jira before it, I had prepared by copy pasting all the fields to a working document and was genuinely impressed when I pressed the "ok reauthenticate" button and it reloaded all the changed fields from browser local storage and I didn't need to rely on my temporary document. Because before that, I came from a government department that had burnt through a few itsm tools. Every single one of them failed. Every single one of them was deployed by the same person who used to work on my team. He was useless on my team too. Still, it's not as bad as when HPE bought Cray and moved their customer ticketing over.

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Newdles@reddit

Ditto. Custom just makes shit sticky for the inevitable time when you're told to switch to something cheaper with like for like functionality. I despise customizing platforms like this. It's short term benefit to hit you in the feels then you realize what you've done.

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cereal7802@reddit

> and if you get the customisation wrong…. or SNOW is updated...

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brownhotdogwater@reddit

I am a big fan of Freshservice for just this reason. You can’t customize it to shit.

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RevolutionaryWorry87@reddit

We use fresh service. It just works.

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dr_z0idberg_md@reddit

ServiceNow, like SalesForce and Atlassian, is only as useful as your company designs it to be. It works out-of-the-box, but if you have dedicated admins with clear goals from other segments of your org, then it can be an extremely useful and efficient tool. This is why ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Atlassian have near-monopolies in their respective areas. If you are a small org or have simple needs, then it's best to look at other alternatives, or else you're just buying and insuring a Ferrari to drive in Los Angeles traffic, or using your $6 gaming computer to play Solitaire.

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darps@reddit

What unites these platforms is amazing marketing around analytics for management.

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redunculuspanda@reddit

In my experience SNOW is often implemented by teams with no real understanding of how to implement enterprise systems, no clear understanding of ITIL and no idea of how to build good it process's. Customisations are usually done poorly to avoid using OoTB functionality or modules. It’s treated as a service desk tool and not given the resources you would normally need to run it. Like any enterprise system you need a team of app specialists, not just giving it to service desk and walking away.

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darps@reddit

We've spent thousands of developer hours on it, and while it could be worse, it's still awful. Some fundamental design decisions are just inexcusable and unfixable. Who the fuck builds enterprise software on HTML frames in the past decades? Especially a platform where you have to Ctrl-Click stuff all the time.

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bofh@reddit

> It’s treated as a service desk tool and not given the resources you would normally need to run it. Yeah, for better or worse, it’s a big complex system that’s designed to handle a lot of internal and external customer interactions. Using it for just an IT service Is like using a cargo train to go to the local shop for milk.

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darps@reddit

Just the facts that 1) the backend is built of HTML frames, making it useless to Ctrol-Click on tickets in a list, and that 2) said awful backend resides on / whereas the user-facing frontend is on a subpath, are inexcusably godawful design decisions.

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No_Diver3540@reddit

ServiceNow is great if you do everything wright from the get go. But as soon as your CMDB is trash or has in logical structure. It is bad, really bad.

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ascenionnexus@reddit

We switched over to service now too. They acted like IT was an afterthought. Oh, by the way we now have service now. Our service now Support is at India and they act like they have never heard of anything that I’m asking for. An Onboarding form to order hardware and system access, never heard of it.

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bbbbbthatsfivebees@reddit

I've used SNOW in the past and I can honestly say that a lot of people here are fully correct: It's a system that tries, and massively fails, to be an all-in-one solution to CRM, ticketing, marketing, sales, ERP, and a ton of other features that nobody actually wants. We had a massive push to move our entire org off of an ancient semi-custom system that worked REALLY well (because it was built by the people using it) to SNOW and the transition was insanely rough. It was multiple 2-hour training sessions per week on how to use SNOW (with processes changing every week it felt like) and even after 18 months we were STILL using the old system for stuff that got generated from monitoring because the upper management trying to implement SNOW had never bothered to ask us how to best implement it. I left before the transition was fully complete, and at that time all of my user-facing stuff was done through SNOW, but all of our internal stuff was still through the old system. We had much the same problems, and this was about 5 years ago. It was SLOW, it was so many extra clicks to do something that should take one (Like changing the ticket category), the lack of bulk ticket updates, the search being GENUINELY terrible, and just so much more that I can't even begin to rant about. Although the "Saving takes you to another incident" thing must be new, I don't think it ever did that for us.

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volster@reddit

I used servicenow while contracting at a FTSE 250 form. TBH it was incredibly clunky and unintuitive to say the least compared to just about any other ITSM I've used over the years where you reasonably expect to just "figure it out" either as a user or settings it up. By contrast they had a team of 3 qualified people who's entire job was just to babysit the system entirely separately from the rest of the IT dept. IMO it still sucked ass from a UX perspective, but once you'd figured your way around it it was little different than any other firms arcane and clunky workflow that you just get to live with 🤷‍♂️ In it's defense, while it may not have been the perfect helpdesk ticketing system, it was being used for far more across the business. The steps you're describing make far more sense when being used for say field maintenance where the request first needs to be sanity checked and approved, then sent to a dispatcher who assigns resources and books an engineer to go out, then the actual guy with the spanners has to document his work. It's neater and more compartmentalized for each to have their own separate reference number and corresponding metrics

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siscorskiy@reddit

Part of that is how you are using it and part of it is your implementation, although I have encountered some infuriating things that I can't tell is just because of the platform or how we have it implemented. The SCtask thing makes sense when you start to have cart items that have multiple steps or go to multiple teams. Think of it like, I create a request for information from 5 different teams - I create a parent RITM and then 5 different sctasks assigned to each team, and they are all consolidated under the same parent so you only track one ticket, and then it gets closed out when all of the sub tasks are closed. It is slow as fuck though and I have NO idea if it's because our CMDB is massive or our SNOW folks just don't have a clue what they are doing

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postconsumerwat@reddit

I think they need to pay somebody to make it optimized... but that apparently is not important for your org... Bells and whistles on a derelict boilerplate config

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phoenix823@reddit

Think about it like this. Most ServiceNow implementations I've seen have been done by a bunch of IT people. Not process people, not UI/UX people, not usability experts, and certainly not experts on the full system capabilities. Doing it well takes time, focus, and honestly money and real attention. And those implementations/teams are expensive so I've seen them die with faaaaar too much work left to go.

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boomhaeur@reddit

They had the guy who built out our InfoPath monstrosity run with converting everything to ServiceNow originally (basically tried to lift and shift it in) despite many of us emphatically telling higher ups it was a terrible idea. Total shitshow we’re still digging out from.

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peligroso@reddit

Or worse yet, former click-ops IT who were convinced that becming the Salesforce Guy means a $200k and actual respect.

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phoenix823@reddit

That’s what the system I managed was like when I took it over. It was “run” by 2 mid level developers who did whatever people told them to do. No plan or architecture of their own. At all. Process changes impacting multiple teams had no governance. Whatever random IT people could think up they would request and have implemented. It really needs to be managed like a platform with a full dev team. The tool can be configured to do a million different things it’s very flexible. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

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spetsny@reddit

Were you able to fix it?

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phoenix823@reddit

Yes, but it was hard work. On top of the 2 developers I had to hire a BA, a CMDB specialist, a Director to run the whole thing, and a \~$500k professional services deal to completely reboot the platform from scratch. It was worth it in the end, and for a big company/big IT group it made sense. Not cheap or easy, though.

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spetsny@reddit

Exactly, ServiceNow is for big boys!! Remedy used to be like that.

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DiseaseDeathDecay@reddit

This is my org. They don't listen to IT at all and won't give us any kind of API access to do things in bulk.

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Zerowig@reddit

It’s looks and feels like some intern programmer wrote it who has no idea how a service desk or ticketing system works. The UI is just unintuitive garbage.

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RabidGuppy@reddit

Right click the grey bar at the top of the ticket and save. It saves without launching you out of your current ticket into your previously viewed one. At least where I work that works and I’ve shared the tip to many that I work with. For searching, ignore the search bar, use a filter that includes your desired ticket type (number starts with) and short description/description/keyword contains. Service now is a pain, I’ve learned a couple tricks that work with my company’s implementation, but they’re about to make it worse so they can add in AI. Plus they just patched out one of my favourite work arounds for reassigning changes once authorized.

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mflauzac@reddit

I have an update button that does exactly what save does, but without moving to the next ticket.

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spiderz-a-plenty@reddit

We have the same, but resolving a ticket sometimes still launches you into another random one

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Mikel1256@reddit

Ha, in ours Update saves the record and tries to go back to the previous view. Save just saves the record and stays on the current screen.

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BuffaloRedshark@reddit

Same for ours.

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Rhythm_Killer@reddit

Same here

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Grouchy_Knowledge525@reddit

Same

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the_federation@reddit

We have it as the opposite: Save keeps you in the current ticket while Update saves and brings you to the last screen/ticket.

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hosalabad@reddit

My update takes me elsewhere, I wonder if yours is just configured to save?

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dantefu@reddit

That is the default behavior for update, resolve. The Save button can be added to the bar, as a customization.

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424f42_424f42@reddit

Lucky. Save and update do save, but then loads a random other ticket most of the time.

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ls--lah@reddit

I found if you inspect element we could remove the "disabled" attribute and reschedule changes even when "locked". Not sure why it was felt we needed to "lock in" a date and time, but I just reschedule my stuff whenever I please without reapproval lol.

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veler360@reddit

You can also hit ctrl s, if you aren’t in an html field. If you do it in an html field it’ll try and save the html as a html file.

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SaintEyegor@reddit

Probably the implementation. I’ve seen really good implementations. Ours is a shitshow. It’s slow AF, is convoluted and painful to use. Anything that the single developer didn’t think of is a “generic service request” and has to be manually handled. ALL of our internal docs are on Snow but not easily searchable or logically laid out. If we ever have a major outage, we are so screwed.

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slashinhobo1@reddit

From what ive seen of the product it truly requires at bate minmum one person dedicated to the product depending on what you need from it. Its a verstial tool when all the visions of the users are aligned. You can have the top dedicated what it should look like but those who reuly use it might think its useless because it doesnt suit their needs.

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Elevated_Misanthropy@reddit

REQs can have multiple RITMs, which can have multiple SCTASKs. It sounds like this portion of your implementation may need tweaking.

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juanzelli@reddit

I've always considered ServiceNow and Sharepoint to be in the same world of non-intuitive worthlessness

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bw_van_manen@reddit

I switched companies and we now have ServiceNow instead of TOPdesk. It's incredible how much worse SNOW is. The interface looks 20 years older, the license is so expensive they limit operator accounts as much as possible, and it's apparently so hard to change settings that it has to go through a whole request process. I can't wait to switch back.

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hath0r@reddit

the case is so everyone who has to work on the problem can get credit

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sharkstax@reddit

Ours sucks too. It's by far my least favorite tool at work. I hear my next-door colleague swearing at it at least five times a day.

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Jazzministrat0r@reddit

The biggest issue as most have pointed out is if you want SNOW to work well for you, you have to cough up the cash to get it that way. Either by hiring a full time SNOW DEV or ARCH, or getting a crappy consulting team offshore who lie about what they know and fumble the entire project for 12 months resolving nothing. Guess which boat I'm in. It also doesn't that folks just want it to work like the old system. They want it to just completely replicate it instead of adopting new. So now we have these guys going on goose chases to try to replicate what we had in the last system.

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ThrowRAcc1097@reddit

I despise ServiceNow. I think it has potential to be great if implemented properly, but I've never worked at a company that implemented it properly, so it always sucked. Some companies have a dedicated ServiceNow team because of all the complexities.

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byrontheconqueror@reddit

We've had it for a year and I still can't figure out how to open tickets or see tickets assigned to me.

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malikto44@reddit

Service Now can be a good product, or it can be Hell on Earth, with no Doomguy. In my experience, you have to have a focus on design, get it done, and do not let it devolve into design by committee. Otherwise you get tons of worthless fields that you have to fill out that have zero relevance to the product, and just waste time as people have to stuff something in that field. I'd rather use Jira than SNOW. At least with enough beatdowns with a hammer, you can make Jira into something usable with workflows.

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underpaid--sysadmin@reddit

I never cared for SNOW. I'm not sure if I've just never come across a company who can configure it well or if it's just kinda shitty by default.

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Murky-Bike-3831@reddit

There is a direct correlation between how much money you paid for their SaaS platform and how well it works. You can’t convince me otherwise.

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raytracer78@reddit

Yeah, seems about the same as my experience with it. I came from a company using osTicket which was free and that was 100x better than the beast that is ServiceNow that I'm stuck using at my new org. We have two full time SNOW "admins" that manage the platform and it still blows.

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MickCollins@reddit

I was using ServiceNow twelve years ago (and three jobs ago at that) and it was solid - but I wasn't involved in its rollout or administration. I don't think we asked a whole lot of it.

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RyeonToast@reddit

I can't even create a ticket assigned to myself, unless I do a janky work-around that absolutely should not work. Our implementation is not good.

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Due_Capital_3507@reddit

You need SNOW devs

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73-68-70-78-62-73-73@reddit

I'm in the US. This sounds exactly like my experience. I fucking hate ServiceNow. > I have no admin access to anything on ServiceNow, definitely no API key You can use something like BeautifulSoup, steal a cookie from your web session, and use that to interact with SNOW from scripts. I scrubbed the rest from my mind, so I don't remember if you get JSON at that point, but I think you do.

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Beautiful_Tower8539@reddit

A bit of both, your implementation and ServiceNow just in general seem to make everything long-winded. It's good for getting statistics and reports for management, but for people actually having to use and interact with it daily, it just feels like a chore - so many buttons to click, unable to batch change/merge multiple/duplicate cases. All this adds up when you're trying to get work done. We are on our 2nd implementation of ServiceNow, both times working with a consultant and IDK, they just changed some buttons around and made us have to click more buttons. But hey, at least they get clearer reports and added an AI chatbot...

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lcarsadmin@reddit

SN may have its quirks, but Ive used far worse.

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Fluffy-Queequeg@reddit

If it’s anything like our ServiceNow setup, then yes, it’s a pain. Half the problem is just incredibly bad setup of the master data. CI’s that make no sense, or CI’s that describe the wrong thing, or CI’s that assign tickets to L3 support but are the first thing the user is presented with in the drop down list when logging tickets, so half our team’s job is reassigning tickets back to the service desk. We get so many tickets where the CI is just completely wrong, but the service desk just reassigns it to whoever the end user says it should go to. That means the reporting on issues based on the CI is rubbish. Changes and CTASKS drive me insane because we have no dashboard or view showing our team what tasks we have. We only see Changes, so Tasks just get left there. The task is also usually pointless as it contains no detail and you have to refer back to the change anyway. I don’t think any of this is the fault of the product. It’s just another symptom of what happens when you outsource the administration of something to the lowest bidder who claims they are experts.

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PositiveBubbles@reddit

For some reason "the business" (God only knows which professional area decided) won't let us link requests to changes, only incidents. One of our reasons under the change form is "Continuous Improvement" though :P I don't know if it's just me but I've found loading tickets/views etc really slow the last few weeks, whether I'm WFH on AoVPN or in the office

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pppjurac@reddit

"KISS" Keep it Simple, Stupid. Less bloat, better response, less burocracy. If it cover 99% od usage, it is enough.

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Fatality@reddit

Vibe code your own ticketing system

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pppjurac@reddit

Liaba Gott... nein!

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Gummyrabbit@reddit

It sucks. I especially hate the weird menu structure.

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Ok_Conclusion5966@reddit

so many people will tell you, it's great if you can configure and customise it to suit your needs! they won't ever tell you the time, effort and costs involved, then you need to keep a specialist hired at all times to maintain and add to the existing configuration, that person leaves, you need a replacement the majority of companies just want a simple ticketing system, internal and external access, api's, user management, linking tickets and having knowledge base articles everything else is just bullshit to charge the customer more, some have the audacity to add in sso tax

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Fatality@reddit

We have 4 dedicated people maintaining it plus consultants and it's still a pain.

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Orangesteel@reddit

I used most of the major Helpdesk’s. None of them work really well. Their sales teams tell you that *their* product is different. It is, but probably isn’t better. These are generic products for specific use cases. ERP systems are even worse, for the same reason IMHO.

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Fatality@reddit

I was happy with connectwise, haven't used it for years though so can't say if it's still decent. Halo ITSM is nice.

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TeflonJon__@reddit

REQ can have multiple RITMs depending on how you define your catalog request items - so a request for a laptop may have one RITM, but that RITM could have two SCTASKS associated (procure laptop and configure laptop). But this can be redefined as your org needs

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SevaraB@reddit

Most places that have ServiceNow don’t need ServoceNow and don’t really get what it’s for. ServiceNow is a behemoth meant for huge ticket machines- places where dealing with incidents involves multiple teams “lobbing things over the fence” to each other. If it doesn’t involve at least two teams and a project manager that deals specifically in abstract workflows and generates at least 8 tickets per tech per day, ServiceNow isn’t going to help as much as a simpler ticketing system.

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Fatality@reddit

We kinda have that, my big issue with SNOW is that it does a lot of things but none of them very well.

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vloors1423@reddit

It’s shit. You’re not alone

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Fatality@reddit

Typical Java app

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sephiroth_d@reddit

Its absolute trash but their marketing is what corporate ceos crave.

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dantefu@reddit

A little taste of that: https://www.servicenow.com/blogs/2024/how-we-idris-elba-reimagine-future

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che-che-chester@reddit

For the inheritance on changes, I always felt like it was built for really complicated changes where you need to have tons of subtasks, each one for a subset of CIs and performed by a different team. If it inherited the CIs and assigned user (which everyone would roll with), your change would not be correct. Don’t get me wrong, it annoys the shit out of me too. Most requests I submit are for one CI and I’m doing every subtask yet I still need to add the CI and assign it to myself on every step. But then I’ll do a bigger change with dozens of CIs and various teams involved, and it makes more sense why it works that way. It would nice if there was checkbox on the parent that said inherit CIs and assigned user.

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erirutakas@reddit

Holy crap do I have an alter ego named Relative_Hippo2549 that posts the things I want to say when my primary consciousness is asleep?

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hosalabad@reddit

Our instance was put together by someone who couldn't accept feedback. It has taken years to recover.

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matt95110@reddit

ServiceNow works best when you have a dedicated SME who actually maintains it.

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wyndwatcher@reddit

It truly has a fugly ui for users. If your ServiceNow IT team ever does a "refresh" of how the UI looks, it'll have all sorts of broken links within itself. KB articles that used to be visible to all, no more. We use it for all sorts lf IT nonsense, software/hardware, change control, intake and platform support assignment groups, user software licenses, etc.

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Zer0C00L321@reddit

I hate it.

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Efficient_Art_2339@reddit

It is definitely your implementation. ServiceNow is incredibly powerful but 90% of companies customize it into a convoluted mess instead of using the out of the box workflows.

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GuyWhoSaysYouManiac@reddit

Hot take: If 90% of companies don't get it right, the product is the issue.

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StaticVoidMain2018@reddit

Ive gone and studdied how to do 50% of everything via url injections to save time

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R555g21@reddit

It’s terrible.

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2funny2furious@reddit

It's shit.

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Soyakongen@reddit

And here I was, just thinking it was the implementation at org that sucked… Turns out we struggle with almost all the same issues.

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ranrib@reddit

You’re getting a platform which can do everything, but comes 10% ready. You do 90%. It can take 6-18 months of setup from my experience, and a never ending maintenance

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cereal7802@reddit

and almost certainly none of that is communicated in the sales pitch to execs who choose it.

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binarypower@reddit

my company spent 7 figures implementing it... it sucks but it doesn't at the same time. its like neutral evil

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johnjohnjohn87@reddit

Not sure if it’s our implementation, but not being able to see if something is a string or object when adding a comment certainly feels more chaotic than neutral.

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neoKushan@reddit

I love the number of comments in this thread that begin "You haven't configured ServiceNow correctly", then go on to tell you about all the little workaround and gotcha's with the terrible UX of SNOW.

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ss1gohan13@reddit

I feel like we work for the same company...

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Michichael@reddit

I've never seen a good implementation of SNOW, nor a scenario where the benefits justified the expenses.

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kozak_@reddit

We use it at our work. It replaced cherwell. And yes it is inconvenient. While I kind of understand the rationale behind why we have tasks inside of incidents and etc, I think implementation is pretty horrendous

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Kamwind@reddit

People use to complain about Remedy and now we use servicenow and have learned that Remedy was really smart and well laid out.

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BarServer@reddit

We are talking about that Remedy where the UI was stuck in the late 90s? Where no QOS-Features were present at all? That Remedy? And ServiceNow managed to make it worse? Wow!

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TheITMonkeyWizard@reddit

It’s dogshit. Will cost more to implement and maintain than what ever ERP you are using. It will hinder your IT resources and ultimately stifle the customer experience.

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Spitcat@reddit

Defo a configuration issue, fyi I you select at assignment column and hold I think shift + down arrow you can bulk select and assign/change details

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PercyFlage@reddit

For the saving of incidents - right-click on the save button, and you'll get a drop-down menu with save at the top. Select that, and you should be good.

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DarkangelUK@reddit

As some have stated it requires a lot of tinkering and tweaking to get it right, but once you get to grips with things it can be really good. - If you make a change to an incident and want to save it yet stay in the incident, right click the white bar along the top and hit save instead of using the save/update button. - If requests have been configured properly then you should never see or need the REQ/RITM, just the task. However some requests need more work which you can spawn more ad-hoc tasks against an RITM which is actually useful. - Knowing how to find your tables and use filters is a game changer, even more so when you use Reports. - To batch assign multiple tickets to a specific person/group, click the first one then hold shift and press the down arrow to highlight them, double click into the top Assigned To or Assignment Group field and enter the one you want, the rest will all populate with the same one. I'm in a company with limited access, however they have routes to request things. A great one is Business Rules which is pretty much 'if this then that' which helps automate ticket routing e.g. If a ticket from MD is assigned to local group then set priority high and email service desk. Automated task creation for weekly activities. For example we have daily tasks generated for meeting room checks, weekly tasks for stock checks, weekly tasks for backup tape swap etc.

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er1cAtWork2@reddit

We used it for 3-4 years now. It’s ok but the search absolutely sucks! Overall, it here was way too much required clicks or Fields that had to be checked, it was obscene…

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the_star_lord@reddit

Global search can be configured, I've had no real complaints when looking for tickets but we also trained staff on basic filtering and we built a custom home screen so all staff have dynamic tiled reports on their stacks tickets etc.

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sunburnedaz@reddit

> Made a change to incident 1 and hit 'save'? It automatically moves on to some other random incident 2, as if you're done working on incident 1 because you left one comment on it. Service now does not like having more than one tab open. I found it works way better if I only have 1 service now tab open.

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the_star_lord@reddit

I generally have at least three tabs open at a time and have no real issues, but yes if you have multiple tabs open and press your browsers back button on say tab 2 it will load the data from tab 1 (or whatever ticket you last touched) but to avoid that use the service now UI buttons and it works fine. Which to me is more of a browser issue than servicenow.

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the_star_lord@reddit

Sounds like your config In our environment I set ours up to resolve most of those issues but it's all customisation. Example changes and ritms no longer create tasks because ppl in my org couldn't get their heads around tasks (yeh I know..) And for the save Inc issue you described, I can't recall if the UPDATE and SAVE buttons are default but UPDATE saves and goes to the next ticket, where as SAVE keeps you on that screen.

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stupv@reddit

1. Sounds like you opened this record, browsed elsewhere in another tab, then saved the original. Service now takes you to where your 'latest' session was after it saves/refreshes 2. A REQ is a parent request ticket, a RITM (Request Item) is a child ticket, and an SCTASK is a type of task that goes into requests (there are others). So your structure might be that a REQ is a project if some kind, and it have several RITMs for various components of the project, and each RITM has a task assigned to the various teams that will deliver the RITM the task is assigned to.

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kremlingrasso@reddit

Servicenow is built around the concept of selling your more servicenow, so every module is a Trojan horse for three other. That's why most companies implementation is so ass-backwards, becuse you need to customize it around the gaps that other tools already fullfill. But servicenow does not want you to do that easily, they want to eat those tools and sell sell you their (shallow and hacked together) module instead, and go over your head to convice your bosses to do that. And since everything is routed through the CMDB where everything needs to reconcile and deduplicate with everything but nobody wants to maintain it or quality assure it or control the roles for it so it's alway total mess. Oh and one third of of the year everything is on pause while they upgrade, which breaks what already worked so you can have new functions and features and integrations you don't need or want so you can be sold more servicenow. It's very model is "buy more or we raise the price". Eveyone buys at as "oh we just need a ticketing system" or "oh we just need a CMDB" and three years latter wondering why are we paying 7 million for it.

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eat-the-cookiez@reddit

It’s shit. I’ve used it at multiple places. It doesn’t like having multiple tabs open and can’t keep different incidents or requests open at the same time One job was at a massive corp that had a team for snow and it still sucked so badly

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pbebbs3@reddit

My last org used servicenow. Our admin for the system was a piece of work. Rather than aligning with my frustrations around using the platform, they would conclude the system was working as intended. They would often DM me in Webex than interface with me via the ticket system

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kremlingrasso@reddit

Idk what's with servicenow but it seems to attract the biggest assholes.

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keef-keefson@reddit

My company’s implementation sucks as well. I call it “Service At Some Point In The Future” because it takes forever to do anything.

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Formal-Knowledge-250@reddit

A few years back I worked in a soc and a customer used servicenow for its fleet (250k users) and we never had any issues with it, when we had to check if there are tickets for servers or endpoints that had alarms or checked fleet Infos.

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Effective-Ladder8321@reddit

I had emailed Service Now, whoever our transition folks were since we had to move on from IQTrack, for two weeks every few days because I couldn’t get logged into the system (my boss had been set up to do so, but she decided I’d handle it immediately after). At the end of the two week “trial period”, these same ~~idiots~~ people emailed me asking if I had any questions and if we were ready to implement. Their customer service sucks so bad; needless to say, we didn’t go with them.

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CannedSteak@reddit

At my current location (small university) it's great. It's implemented great, I think everything works real well. Our downfall? We employ student workers. They SUCK. They do not categorize things right, they don't update things right, they don't double check for duplicates, and that's if they even update anything at all. Sometimes they don't even create tickets for walk ins.

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Mandyabandone@reddit

what ur experiencing with serviceNow is mostly a result of how your instance is set up rather than the platform itself. the multiple ticket numbers, manual inheritance of configuration items, slow search, and lack of batch actions all point to heavy customization and complex workflows that make simple tasks frustrating. sometimes the core problem isn’t the tool but the way processes are designed around it. streamlining workflows, reducing unnecessary steps, and clarifying ticket handling can make a huge difference, and in some cases exploring simpler platforms or better configuration options can help without overhauling everything.

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ShrapDa@reddit

I recently started using it on my new contract role and I hate it whole heartedly. This is supposed to be a simple tool, made easy, with flows and all. Their implementation is heavy and complicated and not flowing freely….. that is à fault of them but also of the service for offering to downgrade to such absurdity.

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Lopsided_Status_538@reddit

We use SNOW at my company too, however we've spent a considerable amount of time and money going over it the last year and a half, and we have a snow dev on retainer to help adjust any and all needs. Plus we just recently hired someone who's previously been a snow admin and they've been a HUGE help in buttoning up the smaller items. We are about to implement more of it also with configuration items for IT item requests. I will say the biggest pitfall is trying to integrate it. We use snow for the users and base levels of tier 1-3 IT. However our dev teams use ADO. And since we have fields that don't match, trying to integrate them has been... Well a bit of a ride. Comments on the ado cards aren't transferring to the INCs sometimes. Sending a SCTASK to the ado board breaks most of the functionality and doesn't transfer over the attached items like media and other configurations. It's a "big boy" saas as my manager calls it. I've used much better platforms that were easy to learn and master, but I've gotten so used to snow now that anything else just seems foreign to me. Our marketing team uses happyfox, and my god that just looks like a total mess to me LOL.

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Maysock@reddit

Servicenow sucks now because some PEBCAKs with PMPs decided they needed to be able to track projects in the same app that they track break/fix in. It overcomplicates everything and it used to just be incidents and requests. I'm old and I'm grumpy. Fuck service now.

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MikeTheCannibal@reddit

ServiceNow aka SNOW is awesome if correctly configured. My issue is I worked for large enterprise where it was put together well and now when working with places that half-assed it they look at me sideways when I question why something went crazy after a basic step. Ie why am I scheduling a change and assigning change tasks if no one is doing anything with them once assigned nor allowing me to close out a change but will time out and auto close? Sigh. I really miss my old place. :-(

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ObiWonKev@reddit

Service Now is the absolute worst

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funkylabrador420@reddit

This is 100% your employers implementation. I have many years of experience developing in the wacky world of ServiceNow. The issues you are experiencing are not normal and I see lots of signs of an 'unhealthy' instance / implementation. \- Changing / saving an incident - This is called the 'navigation stack'. It's the bane of my existence and it drives me insane, too. When you click 'back' in the platform, it loads the last page you loaded in your current session. There isn't really a good work around for this, short of using the platform differently. A Workspace might work for you, like Service Ops Workspace. \- REQ / RITM / SCTASK - Think of your Request as the identifier for your 'Cart' when you are shopping. When you submit your 'order', each thing in your cart gets an RITM (requested item). Each RITM can have one or more SCTASK (Service Catalog Task), which are the tickets for Fulfillers to complete the work. Each record services a distinct purpose. How your catalog is configured and accessed - platform, mobile, service portal, employee center - can make this very confusing or very easy for end users. In a proper implementation, a requester only has to think about one number, either the REQ or the RITM. \- There's an easy way to add multiple CI's in one go but it sounds like it's not enabled or you don't have access to it. It's as simple as running a query to list the desired CI's, then clicking one button to associate them with the record. \- String search should work in a proper implementation. That's pretty basic functionality. - There's some nuance to using the query builder in ServiceNow. Most likely a misconfiguration if I had to guess. \- If your CHG's are generating SCTASKs then... that's one heck of a customization. They should generate CTASKS (change tasks) which auto inherits CI's from the CHG. \- There's multiple ways to batch edit / modify tickets but it comes down to how your instance is configured and the access given to users. I feel your pain because with the right access this should only take a couple clicks and a few seconds. \- Performance - A normal healthy instance should be fast. I have seen customers where software like zscaler has caused issues. Some components on the page will automatically display changes, but the entire page should not refresh on its own.

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andyburness@reddit

As someone who used to have to use Siebel, then SAP, then CA Service desk - ServiceNow isn't so bad!

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GeneralRechs@reddit

People are judging a product based on their companies own poor implementation.

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TexasVulvaAficionado@reddit

Our Fortune 100 company also has a similar shitty implementation of ServiceNow. Almost everything you described and more issues too... Really fun when we get third party vendors involved. Some use it correctly, some use it incorrectly, and many don't use it. There's been no training on it since I've been there...

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shanedog@reddit

I have used it at three different companies and it has been slow and had horrible UX/UI at all three. Common page loads take 5 to 30 seconds and reports can take minutes. If you are in it all day like I have to be for my role the time spent waiting for a page to load eats into your productivity significantly.

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poorleno111@reddit

Some of it sounds like your understanding of ServiceNow, plus customizations of your instance. Did they do anything training? You can def assign multiple tickets out of the box, try left clicking + holding on a field like assigned to in order to select multiples. Not at my computer so I don’t have exact steps, sleep deprived from baby. The request process has everything technically rolling up to a request, with a singe or multiple request items rolling up to it. Request items and catalog tasks can also have attachments on them. Can do approvals off requests items too. Think like a Visio workflow. As complex or simple as you want it. Not sure if your admins have customized how you do all that, may make it simpler for end users to just give them their ticket number as an REQ or RITM. To search, try using what they call wild card characters. To search for Microsoft Outlook you could do *Outlook. It looks for anything with Outlook in it, like in the short description field. https://ut.service-now.com/sp?id=kb_article&number=KB0015052 May sound stupid, but ServiceNow has a lot of stuff you can just google too. Dunno if your ServiceNow team is uptight or not but I know I’m generally happy to explain our instance. Ours is the way it is because of stakeholders, good and bad lol.

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Blackblast@reddit

if ur seeing triple tickets, no inheritance and endless clicking, thats process design pain more than platform limits.

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Xydan@reddit

Use it at work and absolutely hate it. I beleive it preys on management and is purposefully painful OOB. Even with the few automation tweaks they've added to it at work I HATE having to track an infinite amount of (Tickets) to understand the request.

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DisplayAlternative36@reddit

Everything you listed is able to be tweaked for the better.

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Ferretau@reddit

The way ServiceNow is implemented can really impact the end uses of it. I last used it a decade ago and back then you really needed a dedicated resource to work on the system and for them to get the correct training to make it work the way you needed it to work. Having said that there are times when it was glacial in its operation when I was using it.

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