Planning user capacity in Strategic Planning Workspace
Summarize
Summary of Planning user capacity in Strategic Planning Workspace
This feature in the Strategic Planning Workspace enables ServiceNow customers to assess resource capacity and review existing allocations effectively. It supports informed decision-making when assigning resources by providing detailed capacity insights through two main screens: Manage Resource Capacity and Capacity.
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Manage Resource Capacity
The Manage Resource Capacity screen allows you to:
- Select a time frame and primary attributes (such as groups, roles, or skills) to view the number of available resources.
- Generate and save resource capacity details, with the option to regenerate to capture the latest resource availability from employee profile mappings.
- Filter resources based on specific capacity attributes within a required date range.
- Switch between Auto-select and Manual-select modes to either view allocated resource efforts for all planning items or customize the data display.
This helps you understand monthly resource availability and keep capacity data current to align with workforce changes.
Capacity Screen
The Capacity screen provides a comprehensive overview of resource efforts and allocations mapped to prioritized planning items within a portfolio. Key capabilities include:
- Viewing current resource capacity allocations and total resource capacity through a heatmap view.
- Analyzing overallocations and resource estimates using an interactive Gantt chart with color-coded indicators:
- Yellow: Planning item with no resource assignments
- Blue: Resource estimates within capacity
- Red: Overallocation in resource estimates
- Green: Resource estimates within capacity (cells)
- Filtering planning items by type, state, priority, or other attributes to create tailored capacity plans (default is prioritized planning items).
- Viewing operational work efforts and estimates outside the portfolio in an Additional items list.
- Redefining workforce criteria to adjust resource views.
Operational Resource Assignments
Resource Managers can create or migrate operational resource assignments to account for activities like meetings, training, and time off. These assignments affect capacity as follows:
- Operational work (e.g., training) reduces available capacity proportionally and is reflected as a line item (highlighted in gray) on the Capacity screen.
- Time off reduces total available capacity but does not update the operational work line item.
For example, a 10% training assignment on a group with 2 FTE capacity results in an operational work value of 0.2 FTE, while a 25% time off reduces available capacity to 1.5 FTE over the relevant period.
Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Enables precise tracking and forecasting of resource availability aligned with prioritized portfolios.
- Supports dynamic updates to capacity data reflecting operational commitments and time off.
- Helps prevent overallocations and optimize resource assignments through visual and filterable data views.
- Facilitates workforce planning by allowing flexible criteria selection and detailed capacity insights.
Assess the resource capacity and review existing allocations, which help you to make informed decisions while working on assigning resources in Strategic Planning.
Use the manage resource capacity screen to generate resource capacity details.
Use the Capacity screen to view detailed information about the resource capacity mapping to a portfolio.
Manage resource capacity
Using Manage resource capacity, select a time frame and primary attributes to view number of available resources. Generated resource capacity details are saved. You can regenerate capacity to view latest changes in the resource availability.
Resource capacity screen helps you to view the following data.
- Resource availability for generated capacity.
- Total number of available resources in a monthly breakdown view.
- Latest date of generating the capacity details.
- Option to regenerate and fetch the latest capacity details from the employee profile mappings.
- Filter resources with specific capacity attributes for a required date range to view the number of available resources.
- Regenerate capacity details to view the latest details from the resource employee profile mapping.
Select resource criteria
- Select a primary attribute to automatically view the available groups, roles, or skills from the resource assignments of the prioritized planning items.
- Switch between Auto-select and Manual-select option to view the allocated resource efforts for all planning items or to view a custom data, respectively.
- Define resource criteria to view the available groups, roles, or skills from the resource assignments of the prioritized planning items.
Capacity
- Comprehensive overview of resource capacity and allocations.
- Current resource capacity allocation.
- Interactive Gantt chat to view prioritized planning items in the bottom tray to analyze and plan work.
| Color | Description |
|---|---|
| Yellow (Gantt bar) | Planning item with no resource assignments. |
| Blue (Gantt bar) | Resource estimates for Planning items are within the resource capacity. |
| Red (Cells and Gantt bar) | Overallocation in resource estimates. |
| Green (Cells) | Resource estimates within the resource capacity. |
- View the capacity allocations of prioritized planning items for your current portfolio and better forecast your future resource requirements.
- Use the filter option (
) to view planning items by their type, state, priority or any by any required attributes to create capacity plans.Note:Default filter is set to display prioritized planning items only. - View the updated resource capacity based on the assigned operational resource assignments.
- View the total resource capacity in the heatmap view.
- View total resource capacity and total estimates.
- View the efforts for operational work and efforts for estimates outside of portfolio in the Additional items list.
- Redefine the workforce criteria by selecting Resource criteria (
)
Calculation of Operational Resource Assignment in Capacity
As a Resource Manager, you can create operation resource assignments or migrate existing operational resource plans of your employees to handle the required meetings, trainings, time off and so on to meet your work requirements.Consider a group with capacity of 2 FTE and resource manager creates a Group type operation resource assignment for 10% of the capacity for training. This operational assignment can be viewed in the Operational work line item in the top-tray of the Capacity screen. The value of the Operational work line item will be 0.2, which is 10% of total capacity of the group.
When a resource manager creates a Group type operation resource assignment for time off, this doesn't update the Operational work line item but reduces the total available capacity.
Consider the same group for which resource manager creates an operation resource assignment for 25% of the capacity for time off, for a quarter from April to June. The total available capacity of the group for the quarter April to June will be 1.5 FTE. This is 75% of the total capacity after reducing the 25% time off.