Design a world-class service

catalog
Create a process to continuously optimize customer experience and
provisioning efficiency

What’s in this Success Playbook

This Success Guide will help you create a world-class service catalog design, governance, and
maintenance process that:

• Optimizes customer experience and process efficiency

• Builds a robust catalog structure to improve search and set the right expectations

• Streamlines fulfillment workflows for faster delivery time and issue diagnosis

• Provides flexibility to make changes to the catalog for relevance

• Defines the right measures of success and predictive metrics to identify performance gaps

Key takeaways

The most important things to know

• Creating a world-class service catalog—one that continuously optimizes customer
experience and provisioning efficiency—is not a one-time effort. Changing customer and
business needs means that even the best service catalogs need to be frequently redesigned
or updated, which can be costly and time consuming.

• You must have a design, governance, and maintenance process that focuses on ongoing
customer needs assessment, flexibility so you can make on-demand changes to the services
you offer, and proactive performance improvement so you can improve value for cost.

The payoff of getting this right

A world-class service catalog design process should improve both customer experience and the
efficiency of your provisioning processes.

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What you need to get started
• An executive sponsor to support and be part of your service catalog design team

Playbook overview
Follow these stages to plan your catalog design, create a customer-focused catalog structure,
remove redundancies in your fulfillment workflows, and define a catalog maintenance process:

Stage 1 – Plan for the catalog design process

Stage 2 – Create the top-level catalog structure

Stage 3 – Simplify and standardize fulfillment workflows

Stage 4 – Define the catalog design maintenance process

Terms and definitions

Service Catalog – The ServiceNow® Service Catalog provides a structured and consumable view
of available services and offerings managed by an organization (it could be IT services or shared
services such as HR, facilities, finance, etc.). It helps manage what services a user has access to
and is the entry point for users to request products and services (exposed as catalog items) from
the organization.

Note: A service catalog can have multiple different views (e.g., IT services, business services, or IT
operations) based on its audience. In this document, we refer to the end user (one who places
a service request) view of the catalog, such as the users of an IT request catalog.

Catalog item – A catalog item is a requestable item within the catalog.

Service owner – Service owners are responsible for the smooth end-to-end execution and
experience of the service they own. They’re accountable for designing, building, pricing, and
enhancing the service as well as service delivery and cost recovery. The service owner also
works with business leaders to collate business needs and with architects, technology brokers,
and external providers to select and implement the underlying processes.

Bundles – A group of catalog items that are usually requested together to meet a defined
business or customer need. The catalog items requested within a bundle can cut across
categories within the catalog and are often fulfilled by different functions across the
organization. You can create bundles with the ServiceNow Service Catalog using order guides.

Workflow tasks – Workflow tasks are activities, such as “place a procurement order for new
laptop,” that need to be completed to fulfill a catalog item request.

Net Promoter Score – The Net Promoter Score is an index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures
the willingness of customers to recommend a company's products or services to others. It’s used
as a proxy for gauging the customer's overall satisfaction with a company's product or service

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and the customer's loyalty to the brand. (Source: https://www.medallia.com/net-promoter-
score/)

Customer Effort Score – The Customer Effort Scale indicates the measure of effort your customers
put toward getting their needs fulfilled. The measurement is made by asking a simple question:
“How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?” Users score their
answers on a scale from 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort).

Service process users— These are customer support agents, service desk staff, and service
representatives who rely on the Now Platform to execute and manage their fulfillment work
processes, tasks, records, and reports.

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Stage 1 – Plan for the catalog design process
Set your catalog up to succeed with a process plan and a team with clearly defined roles.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Clarify your catalog design team’s roles and responsibilities.

• Define clear measures of success for your service catalog design.

• Plan an incremental approach to scale your service catalog design deployment.

Organizations typically have aggressive targets for their service catalog deployment, but they
under invest in creating a process to inform service catalog design and maintenance decisions.
Without a planned process, service catalog design quickly fails to meet its intended objectives.

Instead, create a process plan that shows a clear understanding of:

• Who needs to be on the design team

• The barriers to creating a better experience and efficiency that the new service catalog
needs to solve for

• Where to first apply the new design

• How to scale the new design

Create a service catalog design team with clear roles and responsibilities
An important first step in creating a governance plan is to clarify the roles and responsibilities
required for good service catalog design. Too often, we find catalog managers working
independently with the ServiceNow system administrator to design the catalog customer
experience, its structure, and underlying workflows.

But keep in mind that catalog managers by themselves may not have the business context to
understand your customer needs or the process design expertise to create efficient workflows.
This leaves you with a catalog that’s not optimized for superior experience and efficiency.

Instead, create a design team that includes these four roles:

1. Service owner(s) for business expertise – Service owners are, effectively, the general
managers of the services you provide. They should have the best end-to-end view of
customer needs, customer request patterns, and the fulfillment process of delivering on
customer requests. They play a critical role in defining the items you need in the catalog,
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 providing the right information associated with each catalog item, and making sure that
catalog items are relevant to individual customer needs.

2. Solution architect(s) for process design expertise – Creating a workflow on the Now
Platform™ is easy, but the workflow’s value depends on how effectively its underlying logic
minimizes redundancies. Solution architects or similar process experts (like business analysts)
are experts in process design.

3. UX designer(s) for customer experience design expertise – Good user experience (UX)
design requires an end-to-end understanding of the customer journey and needs, with the
help of targeted surveys, interviews, or even focus groups.

4. The catalog manager for overall process management – The catalog manager’s role is
similar to a program manager’s—they coordinate with different stakeholders to make
prioritization decisions, define processes to maintain and scale the catalog, and track the
right metrics to identify performance gaps.

Apart from the catalog manager, none of the other roles need to be full time. Think of these as
different “thinking caps” that need to come together to design the service catalog. See Figure 1
for more on the service catalog design team roles and their individual and joint responsibilities.

Figure 1: Service catalog design team roles and responsibilities

Keep in mind that the design team members may not have equal rights to make changes
directly to the ServiceNow Service Catalog application. The system administrator on your team
must carefully assign and monitor edit rights based on organizational context.
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At ServiceNow, we typically recommend creating three levels of editing rights:

• Catalog administrator – Can manage the Service Catalog application, including catalogs,
categories, and items and has overall administrative privileges to the Service Catalog app
and all the catalogs defined within it

• Catalog manager – Can edit and update a service catalog, as well as the categories and
catalog items within the catalog; can assign editors and a different manager for the service
catalog

• Catalog editor – Can edit and update a service catalog, including its categories and
catalog items; can assign other editors but cannot change the catalog
managerexpectations with customers.

Define the measures of success for your service catalog

The ideal service request catalog provides a great, effortless experience for its customers and
helps improve provisioning processes for efficiency. Unfortunately, there are number of different
barriers that hinder the catalog’s ability to deliver on this objective.

On the other hand, view every upgrade as an opportunity to identify these barriers and remove
them to improve your service catalog design. The upgrade is your chance to revisit your service
catalog’s value proposition.

So start fresh by asking a few questions to understand the key measures of success for your new
catalog rather than building on your existing catalog functionality. Who are your service request
catalog’s customers? The customers of your service request catalog fall into three groups: end
users, service process users, and support reps:

• End users (internal employees or customers) – These are your primary customers of the
service catalog. They log on to the catalog (or the portal) for their day-to-day needs. Their
needs and expectations vary based on their different personas and roles.

• Service process users – The process users rely on the catalog to get key information on
customer requests, to ensure the correct team receives the requests, and to set the right
fulfillment expectations with customers.

• Support representatives – Support reps are an important set of customers for your service
request catalog as well. End users often reach out directly to support reps for their needs,
and it’s the support rep who logs customer requests into the catalog or uses the catalog to
track requests or answer customer questions.

Instead of skewing the design toward end users or process users only, equally consider the
perspective of all three customer groups for your catalog design.

What are your customers’ needs, pain points, and delight factors?
To understand customer needs and pain points, try getting into your customer shoes to
empathize with their experiences. We recommend conducting in-depth user studies—in the form
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of interviews, surveys, or focus groups—with all three customer groups to dive deeper into their
experiences and needs. Focus not just on their pain points but also on what they like about their
current method of placing service requests.

Use Table 1 as a framework to document your findings.

Table 1: Framework for documenting customer feedback (shown with examples)

Note: As part of the design team, the catalog manager must work with the service owners and
in-house UX experts to identify and document customer needs (see Figure 1 for more details).
The service owners have a deep understanding of their customers and are best suited to identify
whom to engage to conduct user studies. And UX experts are best suited for conducting these
studies and coming up with actionable recommendations.

What measures of success would help track the catalog’s ability to meet
customer needs and create greater efficiency?
When you understand your customers’ needs and pain points—from the perspective of end
users, service process users, and support reps— you can identify the barriers between you and
superior customer experience and an efficient catalog. Your design objective is to remove these
barriers. Many organizations understand this and define clear design objectives. This puts you on
the right path, but you must always define the measures of success associated with those
objectives as well.

Create a set of quantifiable measures of success that you can track regularly to highlight trends
and gaps in your catalog performance. These measures of success serve as triggers for the
design team to make corrections—and progress—toward your long-term catalog vision and
goals.

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There are two catalog goals you should definitely include (but feel free to tailor them to meet
your business and customer needs): an effortless UX and provisioning efficiency.

Effortless customer experience design objectives

• Make the catalog a one-stop shop for all customer requests

– Measure of success – All service requests are offered through the catalog

• Improve search

– Measure of success – Low Customer Effort Score

• Clarify delivery expectations

– Measure of success – Reduced support calls for information and updates on requests
made

• Improve satisfaction

– Measure of success – High Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Provisioning efficiency design objectives

• Increase self-service

– Measures of success – Increased call deflection; reduced cost per request

• Streamline processes

– Measures of success – Faster time to provision; faster issue diagnosis

• Improve predictability

– Measures of success – Reduction in manual steps or touchpoints; majority of requests

fulfilled within expected SLAs

• Consolidate tools

– Measure of success – All requests and services are tracked and fulfilled through the
catalog

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 EXPERT TIP
To secure senior management buy-in on the objectives identified for your service catalog
design, highlight how these objectives help managers see the expected value from their
Now Platform investment. With senior management buy-in, it’s easier to build stakeholder
consensus and scale the catalog across the organization to deliver on these objectives.

Create a plan to incrementally apply the new design on catalog items

Taking a big bang approach to the design of the entire service catalog is ambitious. However, it
can take months to get everyone’s buy-in on the new design and process the multiple quality
and technical issues that pop up (especially if your design is not well tested before delivery).
When you use a big bang approach, you often miss opportunities to collect and act on the
lessons you would otherwise learn by following a more iterative approach.

Instead, prioritize catalog items based on their value (for the business and customers) and their
fulfillment process complexity. Apply the new catalog design incrementally to create a design
process focused on continuous improvement.

Use this three-phase plan to scale your catalog design.

Design phase 1 – Set fundamental design principles and deliver with a small set of high-
value, low-complexity catalog items
• Create the fundamental service catalog design principles: a toplevel structure and
fulfillment workflow standards (see Stage 2 and Stage 3).

• Prioritize high-value, low-complexity catalog items to validate and test the new design.

Design phase 2 – Refine the design with lessons learned and extend it to other high-
value catalog items
• Incorporate lessons learned and customer feedback in the design process.

• Extend the catalog design to high-complexity, high-value catalog items.

• Simplify the process for service providers to maintain and update catalog items (see Stage
4).

Design phase 3 – Ensure everything in the catalog follows the new design principles,
and formalize governance and maintenance for continuous improvement
• Create a continuous improvement process to proactively upgrade the catalog design
based on lessons learned and customer feedback.

• Define processes to evaluate and incorporate nonstandard business requests into the
existing functionality (see Stage 3).

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• Formalize and document the design process to help service process users and service
consumers adopt the new design.

As a rule of thumb, prioritize your catalog items with the highest transaction volume and the
least complex fulfillment process for design phase 1. But first, categorize the catalog items for
prioritization based on a comprehensive assessment of their underlying value (both from the end
user’s and the provider’s perspective) and fulfillment complexity. Figure 2 shows some common
catalog item categories and how you might prioritize them.

Figure 2: A 2X2 categorization matrix for visually prioritizing catalog items

Instead of including all high-value catalog items for design, prioritize them under the “quick
wins” category—these are your low-complexity and high-value items. Demonstrate the value of
the new design through these catalog items, solicit feedback and lessons learned, and only
then scale them to other high-value, high-complexity catalog items.

For catalog items in the “target for investment category,” which are your high-complexity, high-
value items, look for ways you can simplify or automate the process to minimize its complexity
before you apply the new design. Deprioritize all other catalog items until the new catalog
design is stable and well tested.

To assess the value and complexity associated with a catalog item, identify a comprehensive
set of factors based on the item’s value and complexity, and then score them consistently
across all your catalog items and stakeholder groups. Table 2 shows an example scorecard (next
page).

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Table 2: A scorecard example to measure the value and complexity associated with creating a workflow
for a catalog item

For more information on evaluating self-service use cases, and for a similar score card, read our
best practice guide on improving self-service.

Note: When you take an incremental approach, it doesn’t necessarily mean customers have to
log on to two separate platforms for similar requests (for example, using two platforms to request
a new PC and to request a corporate phone line). This is not a great customer experience.
Instead, include all catalog items in the customer-facing view (i.e., the Service Portal) of the
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catalog and maintain the legacy request management approach for back-end catalog items
that don’t have the new design applied to them yet. You can do this easily using an execution
plan instead of creating sophisticated workflows.

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Stage 2 – Create the top-level catalog structure
Your catalog structure can create your service catalog’s success or failure. Make sure
your design sets you up for success.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Aim for six to ten top-level customerdriven categories that cover most requests.

• Offer bundles for end-to-end use cases that align with a specific business outcome.

• Improve search with metatags and naming conventions using customer language

• Guide users to help them make the right choices and build transparency.

Identifying the right set of categories at the right level is a big pain point in service catalog
design. Many organizations struggle with either too many categories—often as many as 100—or
with too many levels in the catalog hierarchy. Search and navigation are ineffective without
intuitive categories to filter search results and terminology in natural customer language.

Many organizations also don’t realize that the goal of the service catalog is to drive informed
decision-making on what to request not simply provide a list of things customers can request.

Your service catalog request structure must:

• Be easy to navigate

• Use simple, customer-focused language

• Include the information that drives decision-making and builds transparency

Identify six to ten top-level categories

When we walk into a grocery store, the aisles are arranged based on how we think about (or
categorize) our needs. They’re not arranged by where the goods come from—even though it
might be easier for the grocer to store and track goods based on the supplier. As a customer, it
would be a lot harder for us to find things we need if the aisles were arranged based on the
supplier. We would need to remember the supplier for each item and keep switching between
the different suppliers to compare items.

The same logic works with the categories in a service request catalog. Many organizations
create categories based on the different teams, groups, or functions that fulfill or own the
service request. This leads to categories that don’t necessarily make sense to the customer and
make it harder to scale the catalog.

Instead, create six to ten top-level categories based on how your customers think of their needs.
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Use this common set of categories that typically apply to all organizations (not including HR) to
get started:

• Hardware – Requests for hardware products that meet your business needs, including
phones, tablets, and laptops

• Software – Requests for the range of software products available for installation on corporate
laptops or desktops

• Business applications – Requests for support and management for in-house or third-party
business applications, not including desktop or other personal productivity applications

• Communications – Requests for services aimed at facilitating communications between

employees and customers or other employees, such as telecommunications, email, Slack,
Jabber, groupware, etc.

• IT infrastructure – Hosting service requests for servers, applications, or other forms of compute
infrastructure, including requests for shared technologies that underlie other services, like
network, storage, global backup and recovery, and data archiving

• Facilities – Facilities management service requests, including moving and relocation,

location improvement, new furniture, furniture repairs, fixtures, cubicle modifications, and
decorative services, on a companywide basis

• Office – Requests for office services, such as printers, printing services, office supplies, and
document shipping and delivery

• Security and access – Requests for security-related services, including badge and key
requisitions

This basic set of categories probably looks very similar to the actual items your customers can
request from your organization. In addition, you can also expect to have some categories
specific to your organization, or you might have have specific catalog items called out at the
category level based on demand or transaction volume. You may also want to tailor or change
the catalog items highlighted at the category level based on changing user needs, changing
business context (like a service promotion campaign), or to personalize the experience for
individual user groups.

For more details on editing and maintaining catalog categories, refer to the NowSupport video
on creating Service Catalog categories.

Define a three-step catalog hierarchy

After you have the top-level categories defined, define the right depth in each category. Once
again, having six to ten subcategories under each top-level category is ideal.

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 Heads up!

Aim for no more than a three-step hierarchy: top-level

category > subcategory > catalog item.

Figure 3: Example of a three-step Service Catalog hierarchy structure

Here are the common questions we get from customers and our take on the associated best
practices:

• How many catalog items should my catalog have? It’s not a question of how many. Instead
of thinking about your volume, be conservative in the number of categories you use (no
more than ten). And ensure you have no more than three steps to an individual catalog
item’s hierarchy. You can even have 1,000 catalog items (based on the three-step hierarchy
structure, that’s 10X10X10) if you categorize them well.

• Can we place a catalog item in multiple categories? Yes, you can. Your goal is to make it
easy for customers to reach the catalog item, and different customers may have different
paths to reach the same catalog item.

• Should we create separate catalog items for the different options possible within a request?
Avoid creating multiple, similar catalog items. Instead, build flexibility within the catalog item
to allow users to pick between multiple options (such as different laptop configurations)
within the request form. Use Service Catalog variable question choices to develop that
flexibility.

• What should we do with catalog items that don’t fit in any top-level categories? For catalog
items that don’t logically align with any top-level category, create an “other” category.

• How many data fields should my catalog items have? It depends on what you need to
capture and why. Never ask for information that you don’t really need to approve and fulfill
the request.

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Create bundles that address end-to-end customer outcomes
Customers are often looking for a specific outcome with needs that require multiple catalog
items and coordination between multiple fulfillment teams. For example, a manager looking for
a new-hire onboarding package or an application developer looking to set up a new server
may require coordination from different teams to deliver.

For new-hire onboarding, the hardware team provides all the required hardware, the software
team adds all the applications, the learning and development team builds a queue of required
courses, and so on.

To set up a new server, the infrastructure team configures the server, the security team provides
access authentication, and the applications team configures the right integrations.

To ease the process of creating these requests, create “bundles” that align with end-to-end use
cases or outcomes that customers are trying to achieve. Each bundle will trigger requests for
multiple catalog items scoped within the desired use case. The ServiceNow OrderGuide API will
help you create such bundles for your service request catalog.

COMMON SERVICE REQUEST BUNDLES INCLUDE:

• Remote office setup
• New-hire onboarding
• New server request

Tailor your terminology to incorporate customer language

When customers look for catalog items, most prefer to use search over browsing through lists to
find what they want. Many organizations do offer advanced search functionality, yet their
customers still struggle to find what they need in the service catalog. Often the root cause is the
IT-centric terminology they use to name and describe their categories or catalog items.

Instead, take a focus group approach to work directly with customers and come up with the
right terminology for the categories in your service catalog. Also, identify the different terms that
different customers use to refer to a given catalog item or category. You must use those terms to
configure key word search for catalog items especially with the help of the right meta tags.

To create effective focus groups:

• Create multiple small focus groups—max 10 people per group.

• Include representatives from different customer groups, including different personas,

functions, and geographies.

• Include representatives from all customer types—end users, service process users, and
support desk representatives.

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Some customers conduct card-sorting exercises to receive unbiased feedback from customers
on their preferred language.

Conduct a card-sorting exercise

1. Provide a set of index cards with suggested categories to each participant.

2. Show the participants a list of existing catalog items and ask them to assign, add,
delete, and change the categories individually, based on what makes most sense
to them.

3. Consolidate the findings. Most likely everyone will have different interpretations of
the categories.

4. Create new categories and meta tags based on:

• Qualitative information based on user comments

• Quantitative information based on cards that appeared together most often

and how

Heads up!

Don’t just engage with customers in the beginning to

understand their terminology. Instead, engage with
customers in small, diverse groups on a regular basis to
continuously improve the terminology you use in the
catalog.

Include the right information in the catalog to inform decision-making and

build transparency
The service catalog is not just a menu of different items customers can request. It must include all
the information customers need to make informed choices.

Many calls to the support desk are from customers requesting product information and updates
on existing requests they’ve already placed through the catalog. On consumer websites,
organizations provide details, like product comparisons to other options and delivery
information, with transparency into shipment tracking. Learn from them: Aim to build similar
decision-making support and transparency for the requests your customers make. This will help
reduce the number of support calls customers make just to get a status update on their requests.

Include this information in your service catalog for decision-making support and transparency:
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• A definition of the service that corresponds to the catalog item—what it is and what it helps
accomplish

• A clear explanation of what is included in the service

• Pricing information (actual value or high, medium, or low)

• Delivery time expectations

• The approval process requirements

• The name of the fulfillment owner (requires additional configuration)

• Comparison with other similar options available (Include it as part of your item description so
users are less tempted to customize over using something out of the box.

Not all information is relevant, or accurate, for all kinds of users. Many organizations provide
different offerings to different users based on their geographic locations or the functions they
perform. We recommend using the ServiceNow user criteria feature to tailor the information you
provide to users. But don’t over complicate authentications. Instead, consider defining user
criteria only at the top level either based on geographies or functions like IT, finance, etc.

EXPERT TIP
Strike for the right level of information depth. Too much information can overwhelm
customers and hinder their decision-making. For example, pricing shown as high, medium,
or low may make more sense than actual values.

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Stage 3 – Simplify and standardize fulfillment workflows
When your workflows are standardized, your users can more easily track their progress.
Keep these workflows simple so everyone benefits.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Design fulfillment workflows with a threefold approach—standardize, simplify, and automate.

• Define fulfillment stages, and their expectations, that are meaningful for the user.

• Create a rigorous process to handle exceptions.

The advantage of implementing the ServiceNow Service Catalog is that you can create multiple
workflows that streamline and automate a sophisticated fulfillment process. But be cautious
when you create new workflows—your design can quickly become too complex to manage.

Many organizations create a separate workflow for almost every catalog item. In the hurry to
meet their go-live deadlines, they don’t really re-engineer their existing workflows to simplify or
even clarify the fulfillment process. Because of this, they can struggle to maintain their catalog or
pinpoint the challenges in their fulfillment process.

Many catalog items have similar fulfillment processes. Instead of reinventing the wheel each
time, design standard service request fulfillment workflows you can reuse for multiple catalog
items.

Focus on:

• Removing redundancies

• Automating administrative manual processes

• Creating meaningful fulfillment stages

• Enforcing good workflow design discipline with your process users

Note: Re-engineering the fulfillment process and designing a standard workflow requires deep
process design experience. Your team’s catalog manager and service owners should consult
with the solution architects (in-house or external) to design lean processes before you convert
them into standard workflows.

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Create a minimal, standard set of reusable workflows
Keep the number of request approvals and fulfillment workflows to a minimum. With too many
workflows, it can become extremely difficult to diagnose problems and maintain a streamlined
experience for both customers and process users. While a few of our customers have gone to
the extent of having a single workflow for all their catalog items, we recommend aiming for a set
of three standard workflows: small, medium, and large.

Follow these steps to create a standard set of reusable workflows.

Step 1: Map out and identify redundancies in the fulfillment process for all existing
catalog items
Your team’s catalog manager must run a workshop with the service owners and solution
architects (or workflow designers) to:

1. Map out the fulfillment process for all existing catalog items

2. Use these questions to identify the redundancies and complications in your existing fulfillment
processes (This won’t be a comprehensive list, but is a good starting point):

– Which approval requests have an almost 100% approval rate?

– What’s the impact of eliminating individual approval stages?
– How many times does a team hand off each request?
– What role does each team play in fulfilling the request? Are any roles unnecessary?

Eliminate all redundant activities in the fulfillment process identified through this exercise.

Note: Eliminating steps will require buy-in from the service owners and process users.

Step 2: Build a simple, high-level, standard view of the fulfillment processes

Not all catalog items have a unique fulfillment process, and they shouldn’t. The team’s solution
architect must work with the service owners to build a standard high-level view of the catalog
items’ fulfillment processes. The ServiceNow best practice is to create three levels—small,
medium, and large—of the fulfillment processes based on the number of approvals and
fulfillment steps required. Figure 4 shows an example.

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Figure 4: High-level view of standard fulfillment processes

In Figure 4, the small fulfillment process example is for catalog items that don’t need any
approvals to execute. As we go a level up, the number of approvals and number of fulfillment
tasks keeps increasing. The large fulfillment process requires a matrix of approvals from the user
side (manager and above) and the control group (the one that makes sure the request doesn’t
pose any security risks or break any organizational policy) before initiating the fulfillment tasks,
which may involve coordinating with multiple different teams.

Note: Design these standard, high-level fulfillment processes based on your business processes.
Figure 4 is just an example to illustrate increasing size and complexity.

Step 3: Map out the exact fulfillment process flow and roles involved for each level
For each of these fulfillment processes, map out the teams or roles involved, along with the
overarching process flow. See Figure 5 for an example with a medium-level (or level 2) fulfillment
process (next page).

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Figure 5: Example fulfillment process flow and roles involved

EXPERT TIP
Tie stage-level delivery targets to SLAs and OLAs to help you make prioritization
decisions.

Step 4: Create standard workflows associated with each fulfillment process level
Once you have a simple, lean process flow defined for all fulfillmentvprocess levels, design
standard workflows—small, medium, and large—in the Service Catalog application. Ensure the
specific details on “who the approver is” and “which team needs to do what” are all built in at
the request level in the form of request tasks and request approvals.

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Figure 6: Example workflow for a subscription request

EXPERT TIP
Automate low-risk, low-ROI approvals and manual steps. Many low-risk, low-ROI activities,
like approving a minor expense, don’t require human intervention. Identify all such low-risk
activities and configure the Service Catalog application to automatically approve or take
the required steps (like reset a password) to eliminate the need for a human intervention.
Explore the ServiceNow Flow Designer to automate your business processes.

Deploy standard workflows incrementally and incentivize service providers to adopt

them
As you read in Stage 1, using a big bang approach for your adoption strategy is ambitious and
can lead to many complications. Don’t re-engineer the fulfillment process for all catalog items
at the same time to remove redundancies—this is difficult and requires buy-in from all
stakeholders (see Figure 5 for examples of the roles involved). Instead, take an incremental
approach. Start with low-complexity, high-value catalog items and demonstrate their value—to
secure executive buy-in—before you incorporate highcomplexity, high-value catalog items into
the new design.

Catalog managers may receive exception requests to create a new workflow that’s based on a
legacy fulfillment process. Not all these requests are unreasonable. Instead of taking an ad hoc
approach to these requests, create a rigorous process to validate and design nonstandard
workflows:

1. Ask service owners to outline their business needs and clearly articulate why their process
can’t comply with a standard fulfillment workflow.

2. Validate the nonstandard fulfillment process request with the catalog design team.

3. If it’s approved, work with the solution architect to remove the redundancies in the business
process the service owners requested.

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4. Design the new, nonstandard workflow for the requested business process with the objective
of making it available as standard option for future requests.

Following this process should encourage your team’s service owners to use standard workflows
for a faster time to market.

For the catalog items that don’t have standard, automated workflows linked in the catalog, use
the execution plan option in the Service Catalog application to notify the fulfillment team about
the request. The fulfillment team can then follow their legacy method to complete the request.
This ensures your end users don’t have to wait for the new catalog workflow design to scale to all
catalog items to find and request what they need. See this video for details on how to create
Service Catalog execution plans and workflows.

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Stage 4 – Define the catalog design maintenance process
Good catalog design maintenance and ongoing iteration ar e essential to maintaining your
world-class design. Ensure it grows and changes as your organization does.

KEY INSIGHTS

• Manage catalog item change requests as “services” to service owners.

• Let process users and owners make minor changes to catalog items without going through
development.

• Track metrics that highlight performance gaps and fulfillment process redundancies.

• Conduct quarterly “user review board” meetings to evaluate feedback.

Many organizations don’t have a service catalog maintenance process in place for making
timely catalog updates. So they call on the catalog manager to make ad hoc changes without
a clear mechanism to identify or prevent issues.

To avoid that, create a process to:

• Make incremental, minor fixes at the catalog item level

• Make proactive, major design changes at the catalog level

Make incremental fixes at the catalog-item level

Catalog managers don’t always have visibility into the business context or customer needs to
maintain catalog items. They must educate service owners on their responsibility to maintain the
relevance and actionability of catalog items.

To simplify this, we recommend offering “catalog management as a service” to service owners

and customers. Allow service owners to make requests to modify categories and catalog items.
For example, all customers can report an issue, but only service owners can:

• Modify categories

• Add categories

• Modifiy catalog items

• Add catalog items

You must also define user criteria so you can manage who can request changes to catalog
items.

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company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Many organizations limit edit rights to the catalog manager and administrators, which often
leads to long delays to implement minor changes. Instead, provide catalog editor rights to
service owners so they can make changes and manage the catalog items they own.

Use the Service Catalog item designer for a structured design and publishing process to ensure
consistency.

EXPERT TIP
Use the “Item designer category request” option from the ServiceNow demo data to allow
service providers to request a new category. Once it’s approved, they can create and
manage their own catalog items.

Make catalog-level design changes

A common pitfall in service catalog maintenance is to wait until the design is completely broken
before fixing it. This often leads to a complete revamp of the Service Catalog design. Instead,
ask your design team to meet at least every quarter and look for trends and insights that
indicate whether the catalog is meeting business objectives (see Stage 1). Quarterly design
team meetings should:

• Review their progress toward the project’s measures of success (see Stage 1)

• Review customer feedback (usually collected by the UX experts on the design team)

• Review predictive metrics that highlight the redundancies and performance gaps (see Table
6)

• Propose design changes to accelerate performance

• Create and approve a plan to roll out changes

Track the metrics listed in Table 3 to predict your catalog’s performance gaps and to highlight its
redundancies.

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company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Table 3: Predictive metrics to highlight performance gaps and redundancies

EXPERT TIP
Use the ServiceNow Assessments plugin to gather customer feedback using targeted
surveys.

The effectiveness of your maintenance processes depends on how well defined your design
principles are, how well the design team works together, and how clear your catalog objectives
and measures of success are.

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The takeaway
As you design your world-class service catalog, remember these things:

• Service catalog design is not a project but an ongoing process that requires experts from
across the organization to work together to create a superior customer experience and
efficient provisioning.

• The catalog structure is critical to creating a good customer experience. Aim for no more
than six to ten top-level categories based on how customers think of their needs, and have
no more than three levels of hierarchy to get to a catalog item.

• A golden rule for workflow management is to have a minimal number of standard workflows
that you can reuse for different catalog items. Aim for three standard workflows: small,
medium, and large.

• For catalog maintenance, you need a process for making minor updates to the catalog
items, and one for making major overhauls to the catalog, to keep it aligned to your
measures of success.

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company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.
Appendix

Related resources
• Creating Service Catalog Categories

• Flow Designer: Creating Your First Flow

• Creating Service Catalog Execution Plans and Workflows

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ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Other
company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.