SCSM Delete Incidents: Removing Individual Items

System Center Service Manager (SCSM) doesn’t offer a simple “delete” button for individual Incidents, Change Requests, or Service Requests in its console — removing specific items cleanly requires PowerShell together with the SMLets module.

Setup

Download and install SMLets on your Service Manager server if it isn’t already present, then open an elevated PowerShell ISE window.

Deleting a Specific Change Request

Import-Module SMLets

$class = Get-SCSMClass | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq "System.WorkItem.ChangeRequest" }

$CRsList = Get-SCSMObject -Class $class | Where-Object { $_.ID -like "CR#####" }

Foreach ($CR in $CRsList) { Remove-SCSMObject $CR -Confirm:$false -Force }

Replace CR##### with the actual ID (or a wildcard pattern) of the item(s) you want removed.

Deleting Other Item Types

Swap the class name in the Get-SCSMClass line to target other work item types — for example System.WorkItem.Incident for Incidents, or System.WorkItem.ServiceRequest for Service Requests — the rest of the script works identically once the correct class is set. Test on a single, known item ID first before running this against a wildcard pattern that could match more items than you intend — deletions through this method are permanent.

SMLets Is No Longer Maintained (Updated for 2026)

Worth knowing before you build automation around this: Microsoft’s own SMLets GitHub repository was archived (made read-only) on 22 July 2024, and the PowerShell Gallery package hasn’t been updated since December 2019. It still generally works and remains the community-favourite way to do flexible, wildcard-based lookups and deletes like the example above, but it’s unsupported going forward. The Microsoft-supported alternative is Service Manager’s own built-in System.Center.Service.Manager PowerShell module, which auto-loads with the console and includes native cmdlets such as Remove-SCSMClassInstance for the current System Center 2025 release — part of the same still-supported Service Manager product covered in an earlier post on this site (mainstream support through 8 Jan 2030). It’s less flexible for ad-hoc bulk queries than SMLets’ Get-SCSMObject/Remove-SCSMObject pattern, so many admins keep using SMLets in practice, but it’s worth knowing there’s now a fully-supported native path if SMLets ever stops working on a future release.

Resources

• SCSM