Include resource plans from change, incident tasks to Allocation Workbench

[Community Alums]

We have a requirement from our client for the resource plans to be created and used on tasks created from their ITSM module.

Although the ability to do so is built in and advertised at ServiceNow's product page and developer page and we've tested the capabilities, the allocation workbench does include such tasks. 

We've been through all the documentation and community about resource management, but this "issue" was not addressed anywhere.

How can such an important feature be missing from allocation workbench? How can the resource managers manage and schedule these resource plan's effectively if the allocation workbench can't handle those tasks?

[Uncle Rob · Accepted solution]

Mostly because you don't PLAN on types of tasks like Incidents.

I think the most common strategy is to create "Operational Resource Plans" that naturally take a chunk of team/users actual availability.

IE. A resources manager that creates an Operational Resource Plan for 50% of their group resource and applies that evenly to everyone, will only have 20 hours available for resource planning on Projects.

I don't know how you can PLAN for allocation against tasks that don't even exist yet.

[Community Alums]

Thanks Robert. We came up to the same conclusion.

Depending on the group, we created "KTLO" Operational Resource Plans for each one, so that the capacity of each group can be realistic and the actuals can sum up through time cards on these plans.

However, we did allow resource managers to associate resource plans with Change Request tasks, since some of these tasks could require significant resources, thus creating the need to plan for them (this "workaround" is very company-specific though)*.

*If the PMO had allowed it, a better practice for these Change Request tasks would require for a project to be created and associated with the Change Request. Because of the administrative cost it creates, this option was skipped.

[Robert K]

I've certainly encouraged the utilization of Operational Plans for these scenarios, HOWEVER there are other pertinent use cases where there are "planned" tasks that resource plans could be utilized where not having a workbench is problematic.  For instance if you have users in Product/Release/Agile space using say, an Epic, it is not possible to use  the Resource Workbench. Suggesting that Resource Management (with the exception of Operational Plans) can be used on "any task" is very misleading.  The fact that the Task reference field on Resource Plan allows other task records can be very problematic.  

[KevinJ]

Agree with this.  Our org directs resource groups to create resource plans against demands, projects or epics. For those groups that use epics, they cannot use the Allocation Workbench to see their resource plans in one view. This has frustrated those user groups and does not help with adoption of resource planning using ServiceNow.  These groups have opted to using Excel spreadsheets.