ServiceNow ITIL Best Practices: The Problem Management Discipline Mid-Market Teams Skip
A head of service at a 900-person industrial equipment firm in the Benelux region sent me her incident volumes last month. The weekly count had been climbing for eleven months straight, from roughly 180 to just over 320. The service desk was adding people. The CFO was unhappy. The CIO had just agreed a second-wave hiring plan for the service desk. Nobody on the leadership team could tell me what the top five recurring root causes were, because nobody had been counting. That gap is the whole post. The ServiceNow platform ships with a Problem module that is competent out of the box, free to turn on, and almost universally ignored in mid-market shops. Every one of those 320 weekly incidents had a cause. Perhaps forty distinct causes drove the full volume. The firm was paying full ticket cost for all 320 and had never identified the forty. This is the hole where ServiceNow ITIL best practices stop being an abstract reference library and start being a very concrete difference in run cost. I want to walk through what mid-market problem management discipline actually looks like on ServiceNow, where the common failure modes are, and what two or three moves get you most of the value in...