More and more customers everyday are moving to Ivanti Service Manager. For most of them, they have little to no experience with ITSM products let alone the ITIL process. One of the first questions I get from my customers is “What’s the difference between a Service Request and an Incident in Ivanti Service Manager and why should I care?”.
Let’s look at how Ivanti Service Manager handles both Incidents and Service Requests
Incident – An unplanned interruption or reduction of quality of a service being offered to the organization. These are break/fix records that are logged against the customer reporting the issue. They are designed to be quickly entered and submitted and to be resolved as quickly as possible to get your customers going again. Within Ivanti Service Manager all Incidents typically look they same. Same fields, dropdowns, free text fields, etc. The difference comes with the categorization of the Incident. Ivanti Service Manager uses three levels of categorization. A Service, a Category, and a Subcategory. Once the Incident has been resolved and analyst can quickly move on to the next customer and so on.
Service Request – Low risk changes to a service or an overall request for a new service. These are much more complex than a Incident. Each Service Request can be completely tailored to prompt the customer for all the necessary information to fulfill the request. With Incidents we may ask the customer for only a few pieces of information about their service interruption. With a Service Request we go deeper. Say a customer wants a new printer. A Service Request will ask them what type a printer they want, where is it going, who is going to pay for it and so on. Then once it’s submitted it gets automatically routed to the correct team, the manager may receive an email to approval the request, and another team is assigned a Task to deliver the printer.
In a nutshell, you submit and Incident when a printer is broken. You submit a Service Request when you need a new printer. That may sound a bit confusing to some, but with Ivanti Service Manager and a knowledgeable consultant we can help you guide the murky waters of Incident and Request Management.
Contact us today and let Dataseti walk you through an exemplary process!