Requests and the Service Desk

A request is the core record of request fulfillment. It captures one thing a person needs from a service, an incident to resolve, a change to make, information to provide, or an item to order, and tracks it from registration through to completion. The Service Desk Analyst is the front line role that registers requests and moves them through their lifecycle.

Why it matters

Almost every interaction between an end user and a service starts as a request. Getting the request right at registration, meaning the right requester, category, and service instance, is what drives the rest of the model.

The service instance determines the Team the request is assigned to and the SLA targets that apply. The category determines which fields and context the analyst sees. A well registered request routes itself.

Categories

The request category shapes everything downstream. An incident category routes to service restoration. The RFC category starts a change, which is then carried out by a workflow. See Change Management for how that path works.

Related

See Request for the record fields, Request Template for registering recurring requests quickly, and Service Level Management for how targets are applied.