Turning on the service catalog

Switching the catalog on, and the three services worth starting with rather than the forty you could list.

Switching the catalog on, and the three services worth starting with rather than the forty you could list.

Turn it on

1. Open Knowledge and enable the service catalog.
2. Create a category or two.
3. Add your first services.
4. Give each a form asking what the team needs to fulfil it.
5. Set routing so requests reach the right group.

Start with three

The three things people ask for most often. You already know what they are, because they arrive as tickets every week.

Three services that are genuinely used teach you how the form should work, what the team needs to know, and where the routing breaks. Forty services built from a spreadsheet teach you nothing and take a month.

The form is the point

A catalog entry without a good form is a fancy way of raising a ticket that says "I need a laptop". Ask what the fulfilling team asks: which model, for whom, by when, charged to which budget.

Every question you ask here is one they do not have to go back for.

Name services as the outcome

"New starter setup" rather than "Onboarding workflow B". People pick from a list before they have explained anything, so the names have to make sense to somebody outside the team.

Route it properly

A service knows who fulfils it, so requests should arrive with the right group already set. If somebody is triaging catalog requests by hand, the routing is not finished.

See also

• What the service catalog is
• Managing services and categories
• Designing a form that helps agents and customers both