Reducing Resource Allocations based on approved Out of Office time

[JR Laprime]

Good afternoon SPM Community.

My organization is using Resource Management for:

• Operational work via Operational Resource Plans (all non-project/strategic work).
  • We currently block out Operational Resource Plans out for 2 Fiscal Years (July-June for our organization).
  • This enables us to see IT resource bandwidth to support strategic work vs earmarked time to support day-to-day operational work over the next 2 years.
• Project work via demand/project centric Resource Plans.
  • As new demands and projects are approved, we are allocating resources to those planned efforts to continue to refine our resource forecasts.

As part of our roll out, we also integrated our self-developed time off request management solution to add Out of Office events in a user's ServiceNow Resource Calendar.  While this helps with blocking out dates for which the individual resources are not available to support new work due to planned vacation/out of office time, it leaves the potential for double counting of hours for previously allocated resource plans (when OOO time is added after the Resource Plan has been allocated).

The only solution I have been able to identify is a very manual process through Allocation Workbench where a Resource Manager can reduce the staff's allocations for future dates on a plan-by-plan basis.  This manual process would not be a scalable solution to roll out across all of our Resource Managers in the organization.

Are there any other, hopefully more automated solutions to reduce resource allocations based on new out of office approvals/submissions to an individual's Resource Calendar?

Thanks in advance for any guidance/recommendations!

[Sandi Wilburn]

This may help. If you are automatically creating entries in the resource calendar, be sure the entry uses the "Type" as "Time off."

If this matches the (default) property in Resource Properties, the system automatically reduces the Availability of the resource by that amount for that time period.

[JR Laprime]

Thanks @Sandi Wilburn.  We presently do have these mappings set and time off is appropriately decrementing from a resource's availability as expected.  What I can't seem to figure out is how to reduce previously allocated time based on new vacation/time off entries.

For a project/demand I understand that auto decrementing allocated hours would not be a great solution as the PM and/or RM would need to account for the assignment change.

But as we are creating Operational Resource Plans for up to two Fiscal Years in the future for our teams/resources, it would be helpful to auto decrement allocated hours based on new time off requests (as there is no way to know all time off requests for the 2 year duration of these Operation Resource Plans' creation date).

[Ryan S]

@JR Laprime  Did you ever develop a solution for this scenario?

[JR Laprime · Accepted solution]

I heard back from our account support team and their SPM product team representatives.  This is what was shared with me:

Some companies figure a resource will take 3 or 4 weeks of vacation each year and include that in the Operational plans (I want to set aside 50% for operational work, but people take time off, so I will increase that time to 55%)-  when a vacation request comes in, they mark it and since it is already figured into the OR plan(s), there is no impact.

If the request is far enough out, the user can place the vacation on their personal calendar in SN and their availability will be reduced at that time.

• I plan to take the first 2 weeks of July off - I create a OOTO event on my personal calendar.
• when resourcing for a project that will run in July, requesters/managers will see that my capacity in July is 80 hours less, specifically 80 over the first 2 weeks.
• If I was assigned to a project before vacation plans come up, I will need to work with my manger to get work done early or get a back fill.  I should still block my time so the team capacity is reduced by 80 hours in July and I don't get more projects assigned to me.

If I want to take next week off - last minute request, my manager should work with me to understand what is on my plate and figure out how to back fill any project work.  Operational work will just shift to available resources.

There is no real need to manage/update OR plans on a per vacation request basis – it is not worth the time.  I may just look overbooked for the 2 weeks I am off, but when the report viewer sees my capacity as 0, they 

Below is OR plan for 50% consumption Jan 1 to June 30, plus 2 weeks vacation in March

Forecasted Utilization 

Since the user is out 2 weeks in March, there is a significant amount of "over booking"

Same with Availability

If they are seriously concerned about the "over allocation", they could remove all of the OR plan numbers for the time off, but is it worth the effort?

They could also create a vacation report.

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I understand these viewpoints as the Resource Managers ultimately have accountability for planning their resources' work and reassigning when those resources are not available.

However, I am not agreeing with including standard vacation time in Operational Resource Plans given that Capacity if already decremented based on Vacation entries.  If included in the Op RPs this would result in double counting of a resource's time as the vacation time is first removed from Capacity and then added to allocated based on the Op RP inclusion. 

Long story short, there doesn't seem to be any consideration to explore this in the SPM roadmap and that ServiceNow doesn't recommend Out of Office based maintenance to Operational Resource Plans.