When you support multiple ITIL Processes with Service Manager, your Analysts may complain that they have to constantly navigate in the console to see the objects they are responsible for or they have to work with. This is indeed a pain and the result could be that analysts are missing important Work Items and Requests can not be fulfilled within the defined time frames. The answer for that problem is to have a single view that shows all your active Work Items and gives you good control to manage them.

Cireson has developed a great Management Pack for this and I will show the most important features in this post.

After the MP Bundle is imported, you first have to configure the settings for the view. It allows lots of excellent configurations to prepare your view exactly the way you need it.

Depending on the configuration made before, you are now able to see the Work Items in a consolidated way.

The views is very flexible and allows for groping or filtering of Items. It’s also possible to display Work Items assigned to other Analysts which is very helpful in Service Desk Scenarios.

The preview pane is customized and displays the most important information of the selected object. For instance you can see if the Items has files attached to it – a pain point that lots of customers complain about because they are not able to see the attachments without opening the Work Item.

Of course, this view is not a read-only thing as we have plenty of tasks available to manage the Work Items. By right clicking any item, a context menu allows rich Item handling.

For Work Items that contain activities, like Change or Service Requests, the activities can be viewed and managed directly in the preview.

There’s even more. So make sure you take a look at this great solution. You can get more information and a cool video here.

Cheers
Marcel