Looking for Input on Resource Assignment Best Practices in Project Workspace

[s_tilkes]

Our team currently builds Resource Assignments at the project level to designate who is working on the project.  I’m trying to understand the best practice for assigning work at the task level. Is it better to assign tasks using the Resource Assignees field, or should the Additional Assignee list be used instead?

I’d appreciate insights on the advantages or drawbacks of each approach, particularly regarding workload visibility, reporting accuracy, and ease of management.

[Nil C]

Hi @s_tilkes ,

 there are multiple pros and cons that can be discussed about the approaches . I have tried to summarize it :

• Use Resource Assignees/Plans to book specific hours for specialized roles (e.g., Senior Developer) to individual tasks to ensure the team has the capacity planned out meticulously. ServiceNow is moving towards a formal resource assignment/capacity planning model, where task assignment is the major factor and has a lot of capabilties built out, as opposed to using resource plan, which is being phased out. This assignment DOES reduce capacity. Resource Assignee requires you to use Employee Profile plugin, which has no extra cost if you are using SPM already.
• Use the Additional Assignee List to add supporting team members (e.g., junior support, project coordinator) to a task for awareness or to allow them to work on it without requiring a formal, separate resource assignment. this assignment does not reduce capacity. Assigned to or additional assignees are part of the core platform / ITSM and not SPM sepcific.

in other words, if you / your customer wants to move towards a formal and modernized Resource mgmnt/ Capacity Planning model in future, then use the first one and plan the move accordingly. if Resource / Caapcity Planning is not in question or done thru some other tool outside of ServiceNow, then you can use the 2nd one. Reporting is possible in both occassions, its the source table which will change in your reporting, so the reports will have different structure/data.

There are multiple sources available already to review the new formal resource capacity planning process, you can refer to these 2 videos as a quick reference. 

1) SPM Resource Management Workspace: A new approach for assigning resources to outcomes

2) SPM Resource Management Workspace: Managing Resource Capacity in Strategic Planning

Hope this helps. Good luck.

Nil