Building user allocation or resource availability

[JDavies549]

Hi all,

It's been a long time since I posted last, and equally a long time since I've used ServiceNow in my day to day work. However, with my past experience of working with ServiceNow, I've been tasked with looking into the SPM modules and demand management to assist with our resource/demand management process.

Looking at the YouTube demos of SPM, I really like the look of it and I think it could really work for us and our demand/resource management process. Whether I'm not fully understanding how the SPM module works I'm not sure, but where does a user (or team member) availability get built or recorded in the platform? For example, let's say I'm a new starter and I have 20hrs of availability in a working week. Where would we record this as part of the users availability? I see how Demand records work, and then I see resource plans. However, it looks as though the resource plans have the availability of a user already set? Am I missing something? I've attached a screenshot of what looks like individual user availability.

Thanks,

Jon

[prsudhakar123]

Dear @JDavies549  i am also exploring the SPM module and interested to see if you got your clarity on this one. 

[JDavies549]

Hi prsudhakar123,

It stems from the default schedule, or the schedule you have applied to your user. Our schedule is Monday-Friday,  9am-4.30pm (please check schedules in your instance to confirm).  If you have users that need different schedules, then you would want to create a new one for them and assign it to them in their user profile.

Availability is then derived from the available working days. E.g. April 2025 has 20 working days in it (Monday-Friday). Therefore, 20 working days x 7.5hrs (for a full working day based on the schedule) = 150hrs available for April.
 
In our case, we want to reduce the amount of available time so only 80% of a user's availability could be utilised for project work. We used operational plans to pre-consume 20% of their time to satisfy this.

When setting up a resource plan for a demand, the calculation will be based on the above. In our case, it's calculated on the 80% of availability. 80% of 150 = 120 available working hours for the month of April. If a resource plan requires 2 days of a user over the month, this would equate to 15hrs (2x7.5) and would be taken away from the available 120, leaving 105hrs available for April.

I know I probably stated the obvious a few times, but I hope this helps somewhat!