Navigate and Find Your Work in ServiceNow


Table of contents

ServiceNow glossary

The following brief glossary contains a list of important terms that can help you better navigate ServiceNow:

Assignment group - An active work group in ServiceNow that an incident may be assigned to. 

Assigned To - Members of an assignment group who may be made responsible for resolving an incident. Only members of the selected Assignment Group may be entered in this field.

Additional Assignee List - A list selection tool that allows multiple additional assignees to be selected, including agents who are not members of the selected assignment group.

additional assignee list

Visual Task Boards (VTB) - A viewing feature that transforms the navigation of lists and forms into an interactive graphical experience. Lean more in this video on Visual Task Boards

Watch List - This is a list of people who are watching the incident. Watch list members will receive notifications that include any information entered into the Additional comments field.

Work Notes List  - This is a list of people who are working on the incident. Work Notes list members will receive notifications that include any information entered into the Additional comments and Work Notes fields.

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Find your work in ServiceNow

ServiceNow provides a number of features to help you keep track of your work easily, including:

Homepage and dashboards

ServiceNow allows you to use an existing homepage or dashboard or create your own custom dashboard based on your reports. One example of a custom dashboard is the My Group's Work Dashboard. The reports displayed in this dashboard include information from the My Groups and Managed Groups reports. These reports will show your team's work and the work of any team member you supervise.

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Filter navigator

In addition to your homepage and dashboards, you can use the Filter Navigator to find your work by viewing the following lists:

My Incident and Tickets - This item contains a list of any incidents or tickets you have submitted.

My Work - This item contains a list of tasks that are assigned to you directly. It is set up to list your placement on the assigned to or the additional assigned to list.

My Groups Work - This item lists all of the active work assigned to one of your groups.

Watched Incidents - This item lists all of the incidents that you are identified on the watch or work list.

My Managed Groups Work - This menu item is designed to list those groups that you manage but are not a member of.

You can use the Filter icon when viewing any of the lists above to can create your a custom list and the gear icon to decide what columns to show. This can then be saved as a Favorite.
NOTE: To generate a raw task list, enter task.list in the Filter Navigator and press enter. To open a new incident form, enter incident.form in the Filter Navigator and press enter.

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Incidents and tickets menus 

The Incidents menu and Tickets menu provide a number of useful pre-filters that can help you quickly find your work.

Click Open under the Incident or Ticket menu headers to open a list of all incidents or tickets. For example, if you click Open under the Incident header, you will receive a list of all open incidents in your search results. If you were to click Open under the Tickets header, you would receive a list of all open tickets in your search results.

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Global search

The Global Search box in the upper right of the ServiceNow window will search all items based on your current item type (e.g. Incident, Ticket, or Knowledge). A sample results list is displayed below: 

 sample results list

NOTE: If only one search result is available, the record associated with that result will open rather than a list of search results.

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Google maps integration

ServiceNow is integrated with Google Maps. This allows you to view any incidents associated with your account in a Google map view. View a sample Classroom Support incident to see Google Map Integration in action. 

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Follow

ServiceNow allows you to Follow an Incident. Follow allows you to follow the progress of an incident, similar to the watch and work notes list, but it also enables a chat feature that lets you chat with other agents who are following the incident. This chat feature also includes a built-in history a chat is saved on the incident.  If the incident that you are following has an update a chat count in the upper right appears that you can click on.

 follow

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Send an item to an agent

Do you need to call a person out directly on an item and get their attention?  Type @{name}, and ServiceNow will notify the listed agent. 

agents notes 

Preview email window

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My tagged documents - view items per tag

ServiceNow allows you to add personal or global Tags to most items, including Incidents, Tickets, and Knowledge Articles. Tags can make searches swifter and more focused. An item can have multiple tags associated with it.  The following example displays two incidents with the "Workflow" tag.

 workflow documents

 To attach a tag to an item, click the ellipsis icon in the upper right corner of an Incident form, then select the Add Tag option.

 ellipsis add tag

 You can also attach Tags via the list view if you use the gear icon to show the Tag column.

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Child incidents

ServiceNow uses a Parent-Child structure for incidents creation that allows you to create child incidents from an incident.

Child incidents can be assigned to individual agents and will receive a Task Number. Child incidents will follow a status progression that is separate from the parent incident, but all comments from the child incident(s) will sync back to the parent incident for customer interaction. 

The following example displays a child incident (INC) for the Network Operations Center (NOC). When the child incident is responded to, an email is sent the customer of the parent incident through the parent incident.  Comments on the parent incident will always include the task# associated with the child incident of origin.

child incidents 

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