Robert Schalk
Registered
My company purchased an instance of Service-Now a few years ago, and it is their official tracking system. In an effort to reduce complexity, and refrain from adding yet another system to manage at work, I am wondering if anyone has tried implementing GTD in this system and if you have any tips, advice or best practices.
For those who aren't familiar, it's a tool that was designed with ITIL at the center of it's philosophy. As a user you end up handling several different kinds of "Tasks" that would all be considered projects in GTD. These include Incidents (stuff reported broken), Requests (request for services) and Projects (major FY projects). You can also create your own "Private Tasks" for yourself.
Most Task types are hierarchical and can be related to Tasks of other types, e.g., the parent of this Private Task is that Project Task. It has a very configurable report generating system so I could create almost any view I might need, at least as a simple list, as long as the data is there. Most (all?) Tasks actually have a "Next Action" field though it doesn't seem to be in their standard views and it is just a flat text field rather than another trackable record.
Still this is not a Service-Now ad and I have had pain points with it. Tasks are kind of bloated to be good "Next Action" records. The biggest thing missing seems to be a way to define GTD contexts without lots of extra steps per entry. They have a tagging system, but the controls to add tags don't appear in the places you want them (namely the "Visual Task Boards" which are 90% there for me). The other one that makes me want to tear out my hair is that Tags are one of the few things you can't group your reports by!
For those who aren't familiar, it's a tool that was designed with ITIL at the center of it's philosophy. As a user you end up handling several different kinds of "Tasks" that would all be considered projects in GTD. These include Incidents (stuff reported broken), Requests (request for services) and Projects (major FY projects). You can also create your own "Private Tasks" for yourself.
Most Task types are hierarchical and can be related to Tasks of other types, e.g., the parent of this Private Task is that Project Task. It has a very configurable report generating system so I could create almost any view I might need, at least as a simple list, as long as the data is there. Most (all?) Tasks actually have a "Next Action" field though it doesn't seem to be in their standard views and it is just a flat text field rather than another trackable record.
Still this is not a Service-Now ad and I have had pain points with it. Tasks are kind of bloated to be good "Next Action" records. The biggest thing missing seems to be a way to define GTD contexts without lots of extra steps per entry. They have a tagging system, but the controls to add tags don't appear in the places you want them (namely the "Visual Task Boards" which are 90% there for me). The other one that makes me want to tear out my hair is that Tags are one of the few things you can't group your reports by!