Resource Assignment and Capacity Planning Guide

[Luis Ataide]

Are you ready to start your Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) implementation journey for Resource Assignment and Capacity Planning?

This guide gives you valuable information you can share with your team, including proven guidance and links to key resources—all designed to set you on the path to success.

While this guide is primarily designed for ServiceNow platform owners and/or SPM Process Owners, and it also contains useful information if you have a different role in your organization. Let’s get started!

Guide overview

Here’s an overview of the topics we will cover in the guide:

• Concepts of Resource Assignment & Capacity Planning
• Resource Assignment Architecture
•  
• Understand current use case & future state
• Charting your implementation path
• Additional Resources

 

1.    Concepts of Resource Assignment & Capacity Planning

Capacity Planning is balancing the supply of resources and the demand for work in a portfolio.

Planning Attributes

Planning attributes are a common currency to bring together supply and demand of work.

The Path of Capacity Planning

Step 1: Estimate Effort (Demand of Work)

Make Resource Assignments to Demand, Projects, Project Tasks, Epics.

Step 2: Manage Capacity (Supply of Work)

Generate resource availability based on planning attributes in a time frame.

Step 3: Capacity Planning

Select the Workforce criteria for your Portfolio Plan

Analyze Capacity

Analyze capacity against the planned items (Demand, Project, Epic) based on the workforce criteria selected for your Portfolio Plan

2.    Resource Assignment Architecture

Classic vs New

Data Model

Classic Resource Plan

Migrated Resource Plan

New Resource Assignment

3.    Current Use Case

4.    Future State

Resource Management Workspace

The Resource Management Workspace is a central tool for Resource Managers to manage the workload of their Resource Portfolio (all resources under their purview).

The First version released in November’23 provides:

• A complete view of all work, including both assigned and unassigned work as well as planned and operational work, to truly capture the accurate capacity and workload of an organization.
• Quickly and easily navigate between the Project Workspace and the Resource Management Workspace via hyperlinked work items and a consistent user experience.

More functionalities are planned to be included on next releases, as per the picture above.

5.    Implementation Path

Recommendation for Planning Attributes: Plan and define Planning Attributes in the perspective of Capacity Planning before starting setup, even for cases on which Capacity Planning won't be used from beginning, as planning attributes are the common currency to aggregate and bring information together for Capacity Planning, but may also impact resource assignment process.

6.    Additional Resources

Community Article: SPM Getting Started - Learning and Enablement

Workshop Recording: Discover and learn about “Capacity Planning” enhanced functionality on SPW

Meetup Recording: Discover Resource Assignment on Project Workspace

Community Article: Strategic Resource Capacity Planning - How to set it up and view capacity plans

ServiceNow Docs: Resource Management in Project Workspace

ServiceNow Docs: Capacity planning in Portfolio Planning

[rafaelafae]

Hello @Luis Ataide,

When allocating a resource to a project in Project Workspace, via Resource Assignments, and specifying the necessary effort for the task (e.g., 80 hours in one week), the expectation is that, using the standard schedule of 40 hours/week, two resources would be required to meet the demand.

However, when accessing the Resource Management Workspace and selecting users with a different schedule (e.g., 25 hours/week), theoretically four resources would be needed to properly distribute the workload.

The issue arises when allocates the entire 80 hours to a single user, disregarding their weekly availability.

Is the expected behavior would be for the system to respect the user’s capacity (25 hours/week), leaving a balance of 55 hours to be allocated to other resources. Instead of automatically redistributing these hours to an “unallocated” status, the system simply reduces the total effort of the task in the project?

Given this behavior, what would be the best practice or solution to ensure that hours are correctly distributed among available resources, respecting their schedules and maintaining the original effort of the task?

[Amilll]

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[Andreas Reuter]

Hi @Luis Ataide 

I am in the process of introducing the new resource assignments at a customer and am currently testing everything in the test instance. The customer is currently using the Request, Confirm and Allocate procedure in the classic resource manager. I am afraid that he wants to keep this workflow in the new resource management. So I tested with the new resource states. I have no idea how they work or whether they have any functional influence at all. Whether I approve a resource assignment or leave it pending, it generally has no effect or influence on the assignment itself. Or can you configure the behavior somewhere in properties? What are these resource states for anyway? Are they purely informative or do they have any influence? It would be important to know. Thank you!!!

Best 

Andreas

[Luis Ataide]

Hi @Andreas Reuter.

It seems your customer will keep following the centralized methodology for Resource Management. In this case, they can leverage the 'Ready for Review' field to signal that the resource assignments is ready for the Resource Managers. More details are available in this community article: Resource Assignment ready for Resource Manager review

Regarding the Resource assignments statuses impact, there is a property to define the statuses excluded from the availability calculation. More details are available in this community article: Key Improvements to Resource Management (RM) in ServiceNow’s Strategic Planning Management (SPM)

I also recommend subscribing to the community article below, as it contains all the information about the new resource management solution in one place: 

Quick Start Guide for Resource Management

Hope this is helpful.

Best regards,

Luis Ataide.

[Mekk]

Hi @Luis Ataide ,

Currently, our organization uses resource plans in classic resource management at the project task level. When assigning a resource to a project, knowing that they work on both OPEX and CAPEX activities, we create two resource plans for this person: one plan attached to an OPEX project task and the other plan attached to a CAPEX task. The result is the creation of two cost plans, which the timesheets feed at the actuals level, depending which project task the person has put in his timesheet.

In the new experience, for this use case, will this still require the creation of two assignment plans for generating the labor cost ?

Thanks

[Luis Ataide]

Hi @Mekk,

In the new experience using resource assignment, there is an out-of-the-box attribute called 'Expense Type' (Capex / Opex) at Demand/Epic/Project and Project Task.

For your use case, you will need to create a project task of capex (Expense type = Capex) and a project task of opex (Expense type = Opex). Then create resource assignments for those project tasks. 

The 'Generate Labour Costs' will create Cost Plans based on Capex/Opex cost plans, considering the out-of-the-box planning attributes for financials. 

More details are available in the articles below:

Quick Start Guide for Financial Planning

Attribute based Labor Cost Generation for Demands, Project & Epics

[Andreas Reuter]

Hi all!

I have a question to the new Resource Management Workspace. Is it correct, that the worspace Shows the Classic Resourceplans also? or should it only show the new resource assignments? because i am implementing the Migration of the new Resource Management on a customer instance and i can see both in the RMW: the old RPL and the new RA and that is a little bit confusing me. as i understand, the new RMW should only show the RA.. i am right or wrong?

THX for Help!

Best regards

Andreas

[Luis Ataide]

Hi @Andreas Reuter,

Resource Management Workspace shows the non-migrated resource plans as read-only.

Best regards,

Luis.

[Christiana Ezew]

@Luis Ataide , we just migrated our resource plans to resource assignments last week, we found out that Utilization data on sn_plng_att_core_attribute_based_resource_aggregates table is mostly empty for migrated resource assignments. Please how do we get them populated? Resources over/under utilized on the resource management workspace dashboard is not acurate because the data is mostly missing for the migrated resource assignments. I see Utilization is populated for August (this current month) and for future months while previous month is mostly empty. please advise....

[Luis Ataide]

Hi @Christiana Ezew,

The sn_plng_att_core_attribute_based_resource_aggregates is a database view from a join between the tables resource_aggregate_monthly and sn_employee_profile.

First, check if the table resource_aggregate_monthly contains the expected records.

Secondly, check if the users exists in the sn_employee_profile.