From Schedules to Strategy: How Far Can We Go with Detailed Workforce Data in ServiceNow?

[jordimsant]

I’m currently working with a client who has extremely detailed information about their employees’ working schedules. Not just the typical 8-5 regular shift, but daily data about when people work and how their time is distributed.

They are running both ITSM and SPM in ServiceNow, and this situation got me thinking:
are we really taking full advantage of this level of workforce detail, or are we only scratching the surface?

Rather than asking “what is the correct way to use this data?”, I’d like to open a broader discussion: what could we do with it, and where does it start to make strategic sense?

• I suppose that the clearest way to apply this granularity in ITSM is through SLAs: one could define SLAs at employee level, but I don't think if it does make more sense that applying SLA to a team schedule. Any other ideas or comments on this?
• From the point of view of SPM, it makes sense to think that a project manager could be interested on knowing exactly the schedule of its resources, or even for a HR rep could be interesting to know exactly when are projects going to occur for a specific resource in order to approve worker holidays. Is SPM prepared to assume this level of granularity? Could anybody explain it?
• And the most important question: if you had this level of detail available today — what would you do differently?

I think this is a really interesting discussion, and I would like to hear from you. Looking forward to your thoughts and experiences, community!

[Mark Manders]

Although it can be done, I don't think it's very workable. It means that you have to update everything continuously. 

SLA doesn't make sense. An SLA should never be used for a group or an employee. Service Level Agreements are an agreement between two parties on when something should be ready. The fact that a user is not available on Tuesday afternoon, does not mean that that period of time shouldn't be paused. The only way using the data makes sense, is if you use it for assigning. An incident should be resolved within 8 business hours, so we only assign it to a user that is free for the next 8 business hours. 

It also isn't practical in SPM. A task has a start and end date and takes an X amount of time. You shouldn't be micro managing it to see if they have an hour on Wednesday and 2 on Friday. The task takes 14 hours and that time is allocated within the duration of the task. 

Being this detailed will only lead to a lot of extra overhead that should be used to just do the job.