Reserve Admin and KTLO Time for Resources

[edavidso]

We're just getting ready to start using resource management for the first time in Geneva and have been building out test cases.   I'd like to reserve Admin and KTLO hours for a given resource so that time is reserved on the Resource Management Workbench when people are looking to book them to projects and they don't risk getting overbooked.   An example would be for someone who spending 10 hours a week on Admin and has 30 hours available for project work.   What would be the best way to show the 10 hours baselined for that resource?   I would need to vary it by resource so that a different resource might have only 5 hours of Admin time per week reserved.

I think this could be done by setting up a KTLO project and allocating resources to that project, but we'd like to use the KTLO bucket as is in the time cards since we were advised against this project based approach during earlier Service Now meetings.

Any advice or related experiences would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Erin

[jimlorenz]

Hi Emily, thanks for the quick reply.   At this time not looking to create an orphan demand/project/program so keeping it in the IT Portfolio to keep it safe and under our jurisdiction. We've not yet implemented the demand module but this is not a demand as in enhancements, projects, service request, etc.. but an IT admin type function.   We've also have week long training, seminars, and vacations we need to account for in a resource's allocation planning and I imagine I'll handle that in the same manner but add a custom field to identify the Allocation Category similar to Time Card Category to be able to manage all these admin type allocation resource plans.

So far the resource management process seems a little clumsy in the latest web app version and does not yet provide the resource plan information needed for a Resource Manager to plan out his resources work and the priority of the work against a medium to large amount of projects in a support roles rather than the primary   resource.   I look forward to your more elegant process enhancements.

[edavidso]

For what it's worth, we decided to move forward with this approach where we have set up a set of projects/child projects/tasks to cover our admin and KTLO work.   We have set-up several portfolios with one for IT Admin, where our Admin/KTLO master project lives.   This was done to prepare us for the resource management so that we can create resource plans against those projects and to support our recent time management go-live across IT.   So far it has worked pretty well to support time management and seems like it will meet the needs for resource management as well.   We're hoping to get further into resource management against these projects (and our entire IT portfolio) in the next few months.

My assumption on handling vacations was that we would have resources post their time off to their own calendars in Service Now.   That looked like out of the box functionality, though I have not tested it.   If you've had a chance to test an approach to vacation time, I would definitely be interested in hearing about your experience.

Thanks!

Erin

[nicholesutton]

Erin,

  We are in the implementation stages and I'm having a difficult time trying to determine how the staff will report Admin (for us is checking email or stepping away from the desk, etc.), KTLO (for us this is daily system maintenance such as checking error logs and not anything tied to an incident or problem) and then project tasks which we'll have staff log time directly to that project.

Because Service Now is so new to me, I'm trying to determine how to set this up and is having just 3 separate categories for staff to log time to for Admin, KTLO and projects makes sense. Is this how your organization does it? What do you define as KTLO vs. Admin time?

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide!

NIchole

[jimlorenz]

Hi Nichole,

We are in the process of configuring Resource planning as we are migrating from MS Project and will use a similar process in SN.   We're creating 2 programs in the IT Portfolio for each Team: Team Name - KTLO Allocations, Team Name - PTO Allocations (includes conferences and training).   Then we'll create a Resource Plan for each team member for under the KTLO Allocations.   In the Resource Plan form we've added a Tab for allocations with KTLO allocation fields for Admin Time % Est. and Ticket Time % Est., and total KTLO Time % Estimate that we use for the total FTE % for the resource plan.   For the PTO Resource Plan we'll use request type = hours, 0 planned hours, Allocations = weekly, then go into the breakdown and add the hours for the week of the PTO, Conference, Training, etc.   By default we're using Resource Type = Groups Resource, members preference = specific members.   This way the KTLO, PTO allocations will show up with the Project allocations/resource plans for a given resource.   It's working in our test environment and now creating custom reports to show a resource's allocation by columns for each month with totals

Hope this helps.