3 questions from the package
From the RFI round. The first shows part of the guide each question carries; the workbook adds follow-ups, how to verify the answer, a priority and a weight.
1. Describe how your product's data model links problem records, known error records and incident records.
Why it matters. If root cause work is tracked inside incidents, recurring faults are not linked together. Workarounds stay in individual agents' notes and are not reused.
Good answer
- Problem is a separate record type with its own lifecycle and owner.
- Many incidents can link to one problem.
- A known error state or record holds the root cause and workaround in structured fields.
Red flags
- Problems are incidents with a different category value.
- Root cause and workaround go only into free-text notes.
- Known errors exist only as knowledge articles with no link to the problem.
2. Can an administrator configure a separate workflow for each change model, such as standard, normal and emergency changes?
Why it matters. If every change follows one workflow, routine low-risk changes wait for the same approvals as high-risk ones. Emergency changes then tend to bypass the tool and leave no record.
3. Can a department's catalog owner create, edit and publish catalog items in that department's catalog without platform administrator rights?
Why it matters. If every catalog change goes through central platform administrators, non-IT departments wait in an IT queue to add or fix their own request items. The catalog then falls out of date with how those departments actually work.
Capability areas
Incident, Major Incident & Problem Management (20)
Incident logging, prioritization, assignment, on-call schedules and escalation notification, major incident coordination and stakeholder communication, ingestion of alerts from monitoring and observability tools, and problem records with root cause and known errors. Change records and CMDB data quality are covered in their own areas. The agent workspace used for every ticket type is here too: work notes and replies, collision warnings, time entries, saved views, bulk updates, and links to development trackers and remote support tools.
Change & Release Management (11)
Change models (standard, normal, emergency), risk and impact assessment, approval boards, change calendars, collision and blackout detection, and links to release and deployment pipelines. Pipeline tooling and generic API connectivity are out of scope.
Service Catalog & Request Fulfillment (10)
Catalog item design, dynamic request forms, entitlement by role or location, multi-step approvals, fulfillment tasks, and bundled requests across departments. Department-specific case handling for HR and Legal is covered in HRS and DEP.
CMDB, Discovery & Asset Management (13)
Configuration item data model, auto-discovery, service and dependency mapping, reconciliation of multiple data sources, data quality health measures, hardware asset lifecycle, and software license entitlement against installed and used software. Full IT operations monitoring is out; only how monitoring data feeds and uses the CMDB is in.
Low-Code Workflow, Platform Configuration & Departmental Governance (17)
Low-code workflow and form builders for non-developers, cross-department orchestration, separation of data and configuration between departments on one instance, promotion of changes between environments, and the effect of vendor upgrades on customer configuration. Generic API and SSO capabilities are covered by the integration module. Also department-level ticket types, statuses and fields, time-based rules, the record of rules run on a ticket, and response time at the buyer's volume.
HR Service Delivery & Case Management (11)
HR case management, employee lifecycle journeys (onboarding, transfers, offboarding), HR-restricted case visibility, employee document handling, and use of worker data from the HR system of record. Payroll and HRIS functions themselves are out. Also the record of who viewed a restricted case.
Facilities, Legal & Other Departmental Services (9)
Facilities and maintenance requests with location and space data, legal matter intake and confidential routing, procurement and finance request intake, and setup of a new department's service desk. Full IWMS, contract lifecycle, ERP functions and external customer service are out.
Knowledge Management (11)
Article authoring, review and approval lifecycle, audience-based visibility, article feedback and retirement, creation of articles from resolved tickets, and knowledge search in the portal and agent workspace. AI answer generation from knowledge is covered in AIX. Also article suggestions while an employee types, knowledge use reporting and translations.
AI Virtual Agent, Classification & Agent Assist (14)
Virtual agent conversations and handoff to a live agent, automated fulfillment from conversations, ML-based classification, prioritization and routing of tickets, similar-ticket suggestions, and generative summaries and reply drafts for agents. Model governance, bias, safety, and AI cost controls are covered by the AI modules. Also per-department switches for AI features and documentation of the data each feature reads.
Employee Portal, Conversational Channels & Experience Measurement (12)
Unified service portal with role-based views, mobile app, ticket intake from email and from collaboration tools such as Teams and Slack, employee surveys, and experience level measures (XLAs). Accessibility conformance and UI translation are covered by their own modules. Also email intake during an outage of the web interface and attachment controls.
Service Levels, Reporting & Analytics (11)
SLA and OLA definition, pause and breach logic, real-time and historical dashboards by department, trend and backlog analysis, and executive scorecards. Experience survey collection is in EXP; only reporting that combines it with service-level data is here.
Questions about this package
How many Enterprise Service Management (ESM) RFP questions are there?
139 solution questions in 11 capability areas: 28 for the RFI, 76 for the RFP and 35 deep-dive questions for the finalists. The workbook adds 110 due-diligence questions on security, integration, implementation and exit.
What comes with each question?
Why it matters, good-answer signals, red flags, follow-up questions, how to verify the answer (a demo step, a test or a document), and a suggested priority and weight for scoring.
Can I edit the questions?
Yes. The workbook is an ordinary Excel file. Change, add or remove questions, and change the weights; the scorecard recalculates.
Which license do I need?
The Enterprise License covers any number of evaluations inside one organization. The Consultancy License covers use with any number of clients. Neither allows reselling or republishing the questions.
