Adding an entry to calendar messes up resource allocations

jamiegirouard · ‎05-26-2016

Geneva Patch 6. Installed resource management, working with it essentially OOB and immediately see an issue - when you add a calendar entry, ServiceNow basically adds three allocations - one of type Allocation, one of type Allocation-Calendar, and one of type meeting. So if you set up a morning event, instead of being allocated for 4 hours on a particular day, you're allocated for 12.

Is this a known issue, or some kind of configuration that needs to be changed that I'm not aware of.

corbettbrasing1 · ‎11-17-2016

What you can do for this is have time off be an "excluded" child entry on that users schedule. The only thing that actually reduces capacity is that on the their schedule.

Capacity is determined by the schedule either: at that users level if they have a schedule or by the default schedule if the user schedule is empty. So to get this to work here is what you need.

An intake form/record producer on "Schedule Entry" that does the following either in record producer script or by work flow

a. check to see if the user has their own schedule, if not copy the default schedule(or Parent schedule if you want resource managers to be able to apply a schedule for them) with calendar entries and name it their display name with a type of "user"

b. Creates an approval workflow/record if you have a requirement for time off to be approved.

c. Create an "excluded" child entry on the users own personal schedule that is the time off (the users capacity is now reduced)

If you do this you really want to add "parent schedule" to the RESOURCE --> users list view so that managers can still say "hey this resource should be at %50 schedule or something, and you also need to give type values on the schedule record (which is just string field) so you can filter, because, eventually EVERY USER IN YOUR SYSTEM IS GOING TO HAVE THEIR OWN SCHEDULE RECORD WITH THIS APPROACH. So you are going to need to be able to filter them out/in etc.

You also probably would want a business rule that if the parent schedules changes it also change the users primary schedule entries but keeps the excluded child entries.

You can learn more about it here: Resource schedules

Someone like arun.vydianathan or ITSMgal who are SN employees and work on the PPS product could tell you if his approach is completely out of the intention of oob set up or not.

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Madhu80 · ‎05-30-2016

Jamie, the behavior is similar in Fuji as well. I am not sure if this is a bug or expected behavior at the moment. However, if you check the Resource Availability section, it would show the correct number of hours, i.e. deduct 4 hours only once from the total capacity.

Also, Resource management reports have been enhanced in Geneva. There are heat maps, pivot, bar charts, etc. The report attached in the screenshot is a Legacy report and will be deprecated in future releases after Geneva. Would your use case be solved with the new resource management reports?

jamiegirouard · ‎05-31-2016

The issue here is with the new reports.

If you look at committed utilization reports for example, it will treat a time off request for a full day of 8 hours as if you've committed that resource for 24 hours. So I'll have 300% utilization for a resource for a week of time off instead of 100% and I'm pretty sure that's because of the three different allocation entries added when someone blocks off time on their calendar.

Madhu80 · ‎05-31-2016

The new resource reports in Geneva do not use the resource_report, resource_report_daily or resource_report_monthly tables. For a given user, the following values are calculated in memory on a per day basis - capacity, allocated (includes all event types from the user's calendar), requested hours and aggregated to a weekly/monthly level depending upon the view's zoom level.

So given a user's capacity is 8 hours a day and the user has time off for the entire week, the committed utilization of the user should be 100% as shown in the attached screenshots. I am not sure if I am missing something here. Are you seeing the utilization as 300% in your reports?

jamiegirouard · ‎05-31-2016

We have a schedule entry set up for our projects - and I've also set up on individually on my user record - that is supposed to only account for work from 8-12 noon and 1-5 pm. 8 hours per day, Monday-Friday.

However, when I set up a calendar entry that is an all-day PTO event (see attached), I end up getting 300 percent utilization in my group members committed utilization report. Is there something that needs to be set up for time off requests to honor the schedules set up in the user record and/or something that needs to be configured?