What is the purpose of using Assignment Groups and are they needed for managing project tasks?

[beself]

What is the purpose of using Assignment Groups and are they needed for managing project tasks? Our System Admin currently has Assignment Groups as a mandatory field when creating a project task. However, I am finding that this is an issue since my resources are unique to a project and not in any of our Department or Company groups (e.g. Third Party Vendor resource). What is the purpose of using an Assignment Group (what is it reporting on? what is it linked to?)? Is it needed for PPM? Project Tasks? How do other PMs assign their tasks? Are all your project resources tied to an Assignment Group? Or do you remove this field or make not mandatory? Do you only use Assigned To or an Assignment List? Do you create a new Assignment Group that would be specific to your project - so I would create a new Assignment Group just for my team members? Thoughts? Thanks!

[Matt Hernandez]

This is actually quite an important question that everyone grapples with. While it seems pretty obvious to use groups in Incident / catalog management (because the demos and forms assume and automatically include assignment group) it is not altogether clear in the Project Portfolio Suite, where you have Ideas, Demands, Projects, Resource Management and all sorts of potentially related tasks coming from those.

In reality I would say the answer to the question, "Are Assignment Groups needed.." anywhere on the ServiceNow platform will be, "Most likely. But it depends on how your managers will expect to manage workloads, and how leaders will expect to analyze the data that ServiceNow can show them about their processes. Managers having more than one resource will tend to look at reports and views that are group-based to understand their workloads. Leadership tends to want trends broken down by groups or units they are familiar with, or that they associate accountability with."

In our company the persons receiving project tasks are often the same resources who also perform operational work. So it makes sense to have assignment group on a project task, because operational managers want visibility into where their resources are tied up, and the system provides this for assignment groups. Ideally as a PM you are creating resource plans to request time from the groups you're assigning tasks to. This gives group managers the opportunity to 'confirm and allocate' a resource to your project for the period that you need them. Resource management has facilities in there to manage individuals, but I think its easier to understand forecasting when its done with groups. With Jakarta, they even added a feature where a Group resource plan can target 'Any member' and the system will examine member availability and suggest who should be allocated to the resource request. In general, groups are scalable. As you grow, you tend to need them, so its good to start out using them, for consistency in your process, training materials, and data.

ServiceNow PPS is designed for groups at the project task level, and I think its because most companies don't have dedicated resources to work on projects. In other words, they're making it easy to leverage your existing operational assignment groups as project workers. The admin could make assignment group optional on project tasks, but that will hurt everyone when the task workers are also members of operational groups, since their managers will be looking at 'work assigned to my groups', rather than 'work assigned to members of my groups'. At the higher level, such as demands and projects themselves, ServiceNow does not really lean toward using assignment groups, understanding that these are often handled by individuals. On those forms you get OOB fields like 'Project Manager' and 'Demand Manager', and the out of box groupings for those processes are more about where it fits strategically (program, portfolio), rather than who is working on it.

Realize that the choice about using groups has an impact on reporting and performance analytics trending data. Report and dashboard developers tend to want consistency across processes so that they can find things (e.g. "there's always an assignment group, why doesn't this have a group field...are you telling me my report will be BLANK in the group column for anything that is a project task?...grumble grumble..") So it makes a difference whether operational managers are going to receive reports for their groups, or whether executive leaders are trying to view trends on how certain areas perform, and whether they want to break down the data by groups that they're familiar with. There are a lot of considerations on how all this should be done. Ideally the ServiceNow admins should meet with the PMO and discuss all those aspects to work out the best design.