Imagine this: you are sitting on the beach with a good book in your lap, watching the waves roll ashore 🏖️🌊🍹.
But then those nagging thoughts start creeping in 😓💭. Is everything alright back at the office? What if something critical comes in? Does your team remember where to look?
Fear not 😎! With ServiceNow's delegation tools, you can rest assured that others have your back when you can't have your eyes on the system.
1. Service Delegation (from the early days of the ServiceNow platform) allows you to assign some combination of all of one type of duty (e.g. all tasks you are assigned) that originate from ServiceNow to one specific individual.
2. Granular Delegation is a newer feature that allows specified delegation administrators to create rules that employees can delegate through. Rather than delegating all tasks, you can delegate all HR Tasks, all HR tasks that are related to an onboarding, or even all HR Tasks that are related to an onboarding and deal with ordering equipment.
This involves assigning responsibilities and access rights to users, allowing them to perform tasks on behalf of others. This is particularly useful for covering absences or empowering team members to handle specific duties.
Key to remember: Service delegation fully reassigns the task to the specified delegate instead of the original user. You'll never receive or see it unless someone manually assigns it back to you.
Setting it up is easy. From the Employee Center, 1) create a new delegate, 2) specify the time period the delegate should be active for, and 3) indicate what types of duties they should receive.
Note: all screenshots are from a demo environment. If you don't have access to delegates through Employee Center, request it as an enhancement from your ServiceNow team.
Granular delegation, on the other hand, takes a more nuanced approach. It allows for highly specific permissions to be granted, ensuring that users have exactly the access they need—no more, no less. Beyond that, you can designate multiple delegates via a single rule. You can also group multiple duties through categories, allowing your employees to assign delegates for multiple items at once.
Key to remember: The tasks delegated are still assigned to you—you are just granting others the ability to see and take action. This means that when you return from vacation, any incomplete items will still be in your queue without the need for reassignment.
To create a granular delegate, you must first create a granular delegate rule. To do so, pick a table, a condition for the delegation, and a name for it. From there, you can create criteria to set which employees can use this rule and be delegated to via the rule. It is as flexible as you need it to be.
Then, from the Employee Center, you're able to select who you'd like to delegate to via each rule.
Effective delegation in ServiceNow is about striking the right balance between ease of use and control. By understanding the differences between service and granular delegation, business stakeholders can make informed decisions that enhance productivity, ensure security, and support the organization’s strategic goals.
For more insights on how to optimize your ServiceNow implementation, explore our ServiceNow Value Amplification Clinic and see how we can help you achieve your business goals.