ServiceNow Tips and Tricks

Group Catalog Items

Whenever you join a new company and you wonder which type of workflows/flows/engines are behind the most popular catalog items, go ahead and group the items by class/category:

This will help you to understand the different type of workflows/flows/engines used behind each item class/category.

For instance, it could be that for Hardware Catalog items the company uses one type of workflow. While for Software Catalog items the company may use a different flow for the corresponding items.

Remember: a catalog item are different from a record producer in the sense that a catalog item has a workflow/flow/engine (for approvals and task creation) behind it, whereas a record producer doesn't. A record producer - as the words say - generate a record in the system after it gets submitted.

Designing Approvals

When designing approvals in your ServiceNow workflows, you have the option to select user approval or group approval. I highly recommend using group approvals as much as possible since it allows you to add or remove members from a group without any development. Even if this group only contains one person, it's still a preferred method. You can also create custom groups for approving any process. A CAB (Change Advisory Board) group may be needed to approve high risk changes.

Source:

• https://www.servicenow.com/community/developer-blog/6-tips-for-understanding-and-managing-servicenow-groups/ba-p/2275392

Designing Flows

When building catalog items, it is best practice to go for seperate flows and not for one shared flow. Looking forwardm with one shared flow, it could get to the point where an update, required by one of the catalog items, is impossible withtout adversely affecting the other items. Easier to develop a dedicated flow.

Regarding subflows, best practice is to create subflows for everything that you can reuse, for example approval. And have different flows for every item. Further you can call subflows from the flow that you create for your item.

There's also step based fullfilment flow what you can use and create simple flows based on it. So, you use the step based fullfilment flow, and identify what approvals and tasks you need.

 

However, if the volume of Catalog Items becomes very large and the items are not significantly complex, you can choose a Data Driven approach (for example, a custom table in which you store the data that is used to create tasks and/or approvals). If there are few items that are also complex, then it's a good practice to build a flow separately for each item. Indeed, with as much reusable logic as possible.