ServiceNow Incident Management That Actually Lowers MTTR
A service desk manager pinged me last month with a screenshot of her Performance Analytics dashboard. Mean time to resolution on P2 incidents had drifted from 4.2 hours to 6.8 hours over two quarters. Nobody had shipped a bad release. Nobody had lost engineers. Ticket volume was flat. The number just kept climbing, quietly, the way these numbers do. Her CIO wanted a plan by Friday. We spent forty minutes on the call. The problem was not the tool. Her instance was a fairly clean Vancouver build, incident table lightly customised, assignment groups sane. The problem was the way people had been taught to use it. Every senior engineer had a private ritual for triaging tickets. Every team lead had their own definition of "in progress". The routing rules had been extended eleven times in eighteen months, each extension solving one manager's complaint and quietly slowing everything else down. What she needed was not a new module. She needed to strip the incident process back to what ITIL actually says and let the platform do its job.