Resources Planning for Operational and Administrative Work

[tahajassim]

We have a requirements by which we need to allocate a % of the resources time on attending to the operational work of supporting the business such as Request and Incidents which vary from a resource group to another; furthermore, there are administrative activities which take part of the daily working hours such attending training by the company or business travel. Not to mention that a resource   can get sick and there are public holidays which would minimize the total number of working hours available in the week.

Ideally, when demands are created and then we create a resource plan, we would see the available hours for a resource group, provided the resources have been already made committed to other project activities.

My question how do I reflect such future allocation of the resources on non project activities such operational work by which when a user/group is being selected for resources forecast, it does takes into consideration of such future allocation.

In our company, we usually have two set of work, Change the Business which is mainly focused on growing the business and introducing new systems; and Run the Business which is mainly focused on supporting the business operation. Another type of work exist which are administrative work that is needed but no directly linked to the bottom line of IT, in other words it's not counted as part of the total efforts quota of the resources.

I am new to ServiceNow and what came to my mind is that I can create a planned task for the entire year and then create a resource plan for each resource group of the expected efforts being utilized on the operational work. I have not yet tested this, however I wanted to get the feedback of ServiceNow gurus on the subject.

Similarly, if I want to reflect planned vacations or training, where can I do that?

Thanks a lot.

Taha

[markdevries]

I have a very similar need in using ServiceNow.   I have some IT and business groups which provide primarily Operations Support, as opposed to Project work.   I have tried a couple of things but am still looking for other ideas to make this easier and more effective.

I have used individual Resource Calendars to block a percent of time for Operations Support and Administrative Overhead.   This works OK for blocking that capacity which is then not available for project work.   But, it is a long and tedious process to do this manually on individual calendars, whether done by a Resource Manager or the individual themselves.   It's not a bad process for Administrative Overhead (Time-Off, Training, etc.), but it's inadequate for Operations Support which we want to be more granular and we need to adequately represent some variable business or resource cycles as well.   Operations Support is more dynamic than our project work which is usually planned and scheduled far in advance.

I want to try creating a "Standing" Demand for Operational Support at varying levels of granularity (depending on the IT or business unit affected).   I then want to create Resource Plans for that Demand and allocate resources to it.   I noticed that ServiceNow includes a couple of categories out-of-the-box for "Operational" work in Demand Management, which are "Enhancements" and "Changes".   That's not a bad start, and I assumed we could add more categories to that to give us the level of granularity we need.

One of my goals with this approach is to better leverage the ServiceNow tools for Resource Planning and Capacity Management, such as monitoring demand plans/forecasts against actuals, etc.

I would like to know if anyone else is doing this or something similar which we might learn from without reinventing the wheel.   Thanks!

[dvp]

Hello,

We did implement the resource planning for operational and release work to our IT team. Here is what we did

First Let me first explain you how the OOB works and also how it is interlinked with other modules

• Every resource   plan should have task, for example if we are submitting a resource plan for project, then we pick project.
• we will   also need to specify the start and end dates which are important for a resource plan

Once the plan is allocated, user can submit a time card by picking the project in the task field. After submitting the time card the resource plan that is tied to task is   populated automatically. Also, the entered time is automatically updated to Actual hours field on the Resource plan as well as actual effort on task that is tied to a resource plan.

So for resource planning of operational work all we need is Start and end dates as well as a Task.

•     As our IT planning team would like to plan resource quarterly, so we created a new table called quarters   with fields Quarter (Q1,..Q4), Year, start and end dates.
•   We also created a new table called operational tasks which extends planned task table.
•   On the resource plan table when user selects operation type, all we ask is to pick the quarters and the planned hours. Once the plan is submitted we are populating the start and end dates based on the quarter user picked and also generating a operational task and relating it to the resource plan.

When we rolled out initially we created resource plans for all the IT team and asked our resource managers to update the planned hours or FTE field as this will vary from users to users. For future quarters we wrote a schedule job to look for all the resource plans that are allocated in previous quarter and create a new plan. After successful creation of plans we send an notification to all resource managers that resource plans and ready.

This is the overview of what we implemented, let me know if you have any questions.

[tahajassim]

Interesting idea indeed!   I will be keen to try it out internally and see it in action ..

Thanks for the help

/Taha

[MatK1]

Hi,

the quarterly operational tasks is a neat solution.

From our side we're also thinking on the SPM/APM level to which to connect these tasks.

How did you guys solution grouping of demand for operational resources - per service, portfolio, biz application, product?