I remember having a chat with one of the platform admins about the number of variables that a catalog item could have. The response of "Probably shouldn't go above fifteen" sounded more like a challenge than anything else.

Hmmm !!

The CI began as the team looked to using the ServiceNow catalogue to replace everything coming into the team that wasn't an incident - emails, desk visits, teams chats, phonecalls.

The original "File Transfers" request was a rather convoluted three-page word document that literally got 'ported' into a single ServiceNow form.

A couple of years' later it's one of those things that we look at and wonder how the heck we could break it all down into an order guide, put a table behind it, etc. For the moment, it remains as a single CI, a beast, a leviathan, something that I daren't hand-over to anyone else for fear of the "Erm, cheers Pal !" reaction that I would get.

The variable limit ceiling has been pushed to over a hundred, with twenty or so UI policies and scripts to reset things rather than a nice sensible order guide to segregate.

To be fair, order guides weren't an option at the time.

i cringe when "just one small change please" gets mentioned.