Share Your Resource Management Challenges

[Vinitha Chukkala]

Your feedback shapes our priorities. While the Resource Management customer feedback sessions have given us valuable insights, we want to make sure every voice is heard — not just those in the room.

If you're running into friction managing resources in SPM, we'd like to know. The information you share will be used to update our assumptions and inform what we work on next.

Please share your thoughts using the below survey

➡️ Resource Management - Mentimeter Survey

Anonymous Survey - You don't need to provide your name or email unless you'd like us to follow up with you.

Thank you!

[Louis Savalli]

Is there somewhere we can see the results?  As an SPM implementer I'm curious what people are having the most challenges with.

[Mani23]

Dear @Vinitha Chukkala ,

I am looking for best practices for defining resource assignments and resource planning in ServiceNow PPM/SPM.

Specifically, what is the recommended approach from a ServiceNow perspective?

• Should resource assignments and planning be maintained at the Demand level?

• Should they be managed at the Project level?

• Or should detailed resource assignments only be done at the Project Task level?

Current Scenario

My current process is:

1. High-level resource plans are created in the Demand.

2. These resource plans are then carried forward to the Project during project creation/conversion(I guess this is OOB).

3. Actual and detailed resource allocation/planning is performed at the Project Task level.

Challenge

With this setup, ServiceNow appears to calculate costs multiple times:

• once from the resource plans at the Project level

• and again from the assignments/resource plans at the Project Task level

This results in duplicated or overstated project costs.

Questions

• What is the recommended best practice to avoid duplicate cost calculations?

• Should Demand-level resource plans only be used for forecasting/capacity planning and then closed out once the Project starts?

• Is it better to avoid Project-level resource plans entirely if detailed planning is done at the Project Task level or the other way round?

• How are others handling the transition from Demand planning to execution-level planning in Projects?

Any guidance, recommended architecture, or lessons learned would be appreciated.

Best Regards,

Mani

[Arnab19]

1. What is the recommended best practice to avoid duplicate cost calculations?
 - The duplicate costs are created as the RAs are in the project level and again created at the project task level. Currently we do not have a way to determine that the ones in the project task level are derived from the ones at the project level. So, once the resource assignments are created at the project task level, the ones at the project level can be zeroed out (set effort to 0).

2. Should Demand-level resource plans only be used for forecasting/capacity planning and then closed out once the Project starts? - Yes. That way you can avoid the problem of double costs.

3. Is it better to avoid Project-level resource plans entirely if detailed planning is done at the Project Task level or the other way round? - If you are creating detailed plans at the project task level, then the project level resource assignments are not required. But in your case, since they will already be there from the demands, you can zero them out.

[phil_bool_unifi]

One challenge I encounter is that if resource assignments already exist, and you then add Operational Assignments (like annual leave) that take the resource beyond 100% allocation, these do not trigger any kind of notification to PM's that are expecting the resource to work for them.  I think this is an opportunity.

It'd also be great if setting the primary role / group / skill on an employee profile could add the user to that role/group/skill, rather than requiring that to be in place beforehand.

I'd also love there to be more OOB integrations to enable annual leave tracking tools to generate operational resource assignments.  SAP and workday are the ones I'm asked for most often.