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How does ServiceNow SPM determine required resources for a project or project task?

RamchandarK
Tera Contributor

Hello ServiceNow Community,

I am working with ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM), specifically Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Resource Management, and I have a question regarding resource determination.

My questions are:

  1. Does ServiceNow SPM provide any built‑in feature to decide how many resources (members) are required for a particular project or project task?
  2. If yes, how is the required resource count determined in ServiceNow?
    • Is it based on planned effort, task duration, or capacity planning?
  3. Who is expected to decide the required resources in ServiceNow standard practice?
    • Project Manager
    • Resource Manager
    • System‑calculated logic
  4. At which stage of the lifecycle is this typically done?
    • Idea
    • Demand
    • Project Planning
  5. How do Resource Plans / Resource Assignments contribute to deciding the number of required resources?
  6. Is there any automatic calculation in ServiceNow (OOTB) that converts effort into resource count, or is it always manually estimated and then capacity‑validated?
  7. Can this be done at the Project Task level, or only at the Project level?
1 REPLY 1

Mark Manders
Giga Patron

1 & 2: ServiceNow does not decide how many recourses are needed. Maybe some AI skills can give you an estimation on it, but you can't expect a platform to calculate resource requirements based on a task. It completely depends on the organization that is doing the project. 
The calculations are done based on the expected resources needed. So those need to be set first.

3. The resource manager only fulfills the requirements. They don't decide what is needed, they just schedule/plan the resources at the requested time.

 

4. For project related resourcing, that's done on project level. Idea and demand can be part of it (to decide if it can be done with available resourcing, but that's more high over: this will probably take 1000 hours and we want it in June, is that realistic). The actual timelines are set on the project and the project tasks are used to allocate/request the resources for the work to be done.

 

5. They don't. It's the other way around. A resource plan/assignment can't influence the number of required resources. Required means that those are needed to get the job done. If none are available (according to plan/assignments), the tasks need to be rescheduled. The availability has no influence on the requirement. With fewer (or more) people available, the requirements don't change.


Please mark any helpful or correct solutions as such. That helps others find their solutions.
Mark