Resource capacity planning on planned maintenance tasks

[Mads K E]

Hey all!

We are an organisation that are currently transitioning from a PPM system to SPM in ServiceNow.

Currently we are developing a framework for planning maintenance tasks accross our organisation, so that we can prioritize these along with projects in regards to resource availability.

To enable this form of prioritization we were planning to create projects that embodied groups of these tasks that were related.

As we tried to do this in the sandbox environment, we realised that we would create a huge amount of administrative work in managing these maintenance projects.

Therefore I want to ask in here, if anybody has experience implementing a similar way to prioritize planned maintenance work against the project portfolio in SPM?

It is a requirement that each group of tasks can be prioritized seperately, and that resources from all around the organisation should be available to be requested to work on the tasks.

I hope my post makes sense and that there is a guru in here who would be so kind to help me.

Feel free to reach out if I need to clarify something.

Best regards

Mads K E

[Divakar Parimoo]

Hi Mads,

In past, to handle the planned maintenance work over a long period of time, we have utilized pre-approved Standard Change Requests to track the work effort. To support that, we had created Operational Resource Plans for a group who would be working on these maintenance tasks. You can also create individual operational resource plans for an year so that staff's effort towards the maintenance tasks is blocked and rest is available for project work. 

[Arnab19 · Accepted solution]

Hi Mads,

We have released capacity planning in SPW that addresses the use case that you mentioned here. As a portfolio manager, you will be able to view all the planning items and the resource types working on them in one place. You would be able to see which of the resource types are overutilized and when. You would be able to see the planning items that are at risk due to resource constraints.

As opposed to traditional resource plans, the capacity planning works with resource assignments and we have also introduced operational resource assignments. They are similar to resource plans but are resource assignments. You can create resource assignments for planned maintenance work and use them for long term planning in the capacity planning module. We do not have a way to show the operational resource assignments in the capacity planning module yet, however it is being worked on and we will most probably have that capability in the next store release.

You can have a look at this video on our product for more detailed information:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td9HIEJCfMQ&ab_channel=ServiceNowCommunity

Thanks,

Arnab