Demand Forecast components in Workforce Optimization for ITSM

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Demand Forecast components in Workforce Optimization for ITSM

    Workforce Optimization (WFO) for ITSM includes Demand Forecast components designed to help ServiceNow customers predict and manage IT service demand efficiently. The solution provides roles, properties, scheduled jobs, tables, forecast configurations, and a retention policy to collect, store, and analyze data related to incidents and interactions. These components enable forecasting of resource requirements to optimize staffing and service delivery in ITSM environments.

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    Key Features

    • Forecast Configurations: Predefined setups collect data for specific interaction types:
      • Chat Interactions Created
      • Non Priority 1 (Non P1) Incidents Created
      • Priority 1 (P1) Incidents Created
      • Walkup Interactions Created
    • Metric Retention Policy: Stores time series metric data at one-hour intervals for the past three years, ensuring historical data availability for accurate forecasting.
    • Resource Forecast Formulas: Use collected data combined with forecast parameters to calculate agent resource needs for chat, incidents, and walkup interactions. Key formulas translate interaction counts and durations into agent workload estimates.
    • Forecast Parameters: Define average times such as agent work time per day, average chat duration, and incident handling times. Custom parameters override defaults to tailor forecasts accurately to your environment.
    • Forecast Properties: Configure parameters such as:
      • Historical data points used (default 1 year hourly data, max 3 years)
      • Seasonal frequency (e.g., weekly patterns)
      • Number of forecast periods (seasons) to predict
      • Historical days displayed in Manager Workspace charts
    • Roles:
      • Forecast Admin (snagentforecast.admin): Full CRUD rights on forecast tables.
      • Forecast User (snagentforecast.user): Read-only access to forecast configurations.
    • Data Tables: Includes configuration tables for defining forecasts, parameters, and associations with assignment groups.
    • Scheduled Jobs: Automate data collection and forecasting processes:
      • Historical data collection for the past three years, run daily
      • Daily collection of previous day’s hourly data, stored in MetricBase
      • Daily calculation of future resource forecasts based on collected data

    Key Outcomes

    • Provides a structured, automated way to collect and retain detailed interaction and incident data relevant to ITSM demand.
    • Enables accurate forecasting of agent resource needs based on historical and current data, improving workforce planning and service delivery.
    • Supports customization through configurable parameters and formulas, allowing forecasts to reflect specific organizational workflows and priorities.
    • Integrates with Manager Workspace for visualization of historical trends and forecast data, aiding operational decision-making.
    • Ensures data governance and performance with retention policies and role-based access controls.

    Workforce Optimization for ITSM installs roles to administer ITSM Manager Workspace Demand Forecast, properties to configure default behavior, scheduled jobs to collect data for the configurations, tables to store data, forecast configurations to collect data for incidents and interactions and a retention policy to store metric data.

    Forecast configurations

    Name Description
    Chat Interactions Created Collects data for chat interactions.
    Non P1 Incidents Created Collects data for all incidents that are not tagged as priority 1.
    P1 Incidents Created Collects data for priority 1 incidents.
    Walkup Interactions Created Collects data for walk up interactions.

    Metric retention policy

    The WFO Forecast time series metric retention policy is available by default for all forecast configurations. By default, this retention policy stores data at a one-hour interval for the past three years.

    Formulas to create resource forecast configurations

    Name Formula to create this resource forecast configuration
    Chat Interactions to Agent Conversion ([FC:Chat Interactions Created] * [FP:Average Chat Duration]) / [FP:Average Agent Work Time Per Day]
    Incident and Interaction Resources [FC:Incidents Created to Agent Conversion] + [FC:Chat Interactions to Agent Conversion] + [FC:Walkup Interactions to Agent Conversion]
    Incidents Created to Agent Conversion (([FC:P1 Incidents Created] * [FP:Average P1 Incident Work Time]) / [FP:Average Agent Work Time Per Day]) + (([FC:Non P1 Incidents Created] * [FP:Average Non P1 Incident Work Time]) / [FP:Average Agent Work Time Per Day])
    Walkup Interactions to Agent Conversion ([FC:Walkup Interactions Created] * [FP:Average Walkup Duration]) / [FP:Average Agent Work Time Per Day]

    Forecast parameters

    Name Description
    Average Agent Work Time Per Day Average time an agent works in a given day.
    Average Chat Duration Average duration of an agent chat for each incident or interaction.
    Average Non P1 Incident Work Time Average time an agents spends working on all incidents that are not categorized as Priority 1.
    Average P1 Incident Work Time Average time an agents spends working on all incidents that are categorized as Priority 1.
    Average Walkup Duration Average duration an agent spends on a walkup interaction.

    If you create forecast parameters for a forecast configuration, the values set in the configuration are used instead of the default forecast parameters listed in the forecast properties section. For information on configuring forecast parameters, see Modify forecast parameters to visualize forecast data

    Forecast properties

    Name Description Example
    sn_agent_forecast.historical_data_points

    The hourly historical data points to be used for the forecast.

    The maximum allowed data points is 26280. The default value is 8760 and represents the hourly data points for a one year time period (24 hours x 365 days x 1 year).

    For example: 24 hours x 365 days x 3 years = 26280
    sn_agent_forecast.seasonal_frequency The seasonal frequency of a repeated pattern. The default value is 168.
    For example:
    • Daily data pattern = 1*24 = 24
    • Weekly data pattern = 7 * 24 = 168
    • Monthly data pattern = 30 * 24 = 720
    sn_agent_forecast.forecast_periods The number of periods/seasons to forecast. A period is the length of a season.The default value is 5.
    For example:
    • If the length of a season is daily which is equal to 24 hours (1 day) and the forecast period is 30, then the number of periods to forecast is equal to 24 * 30 = 720 hours.
    • If the length of a season is weekly which is equal to 168 hours (1 week) and the forecast period is 5, then the number of periods to forecast is equal to 168 * 5 = 840 hours.
    sn_agent_forecast.number_of_historical_days_in_timeseries_chart The number of historical days that will be plotted in the time-series chart in Manager Workspace. For example, if the number is set to 90,then the number of days is counted from the current day to 90 days ago.

    Roles for Demand Forecast

    Role title [name] Description Contains roles
    Forecast admin [sn_agent_forecast.admin] Grants administrative rights to create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) forecast configuration tables.
    • sn_agent_forecast.users
    • clotho_admin
    Forecast user [sn_agent_forecast.user] Grants read access to forecast configuration tables.

    Tables for Demand Forecast

    Table Description
    Forecast Configuration [sn_agent_forecast_configuration] Define data collection definition and resource conversion formula configurations.
    Forecast Parameter [sn_agent_forecast_parameter] Define forecast parameters required for the formula.
    Forecast Configuration group [sn_agent_forecast_configuration_m2m_sys_user_group] Associate resource conversion formula with assignment groups.

    Forecast configurations available by default

    By default, forecast configurations are available for the following groups:
    • Deskside Support
    • IT Service Desk
    • Application Support
    • Technical Support

    Schedule jobs for Demand Forecast

    Name Description
    Collect historical data for automated forecast configurations
    • On-demand job to collect historical data​
    • Collects historical data daily for every hour for the past three years
    Collect daily data for automated forecast configurations
    • Runs daily at 2 am
    • For each table defined in the Data Collection Definition configuration, it fetches the records from the previous day for each hour for every group and stores it in the MetricBase
    • You can access the time series for the collected data using the MetricBase list command on the Group [sys_user_group] table
    • Uses the WFO Forecast retention policy for data retention
    Forecast resources for future Calculates the forecast resources for the future based on the collected data.
    • Runs daily at 3 am
    • Collects hourly data every day for the formula forecast configuration
    • Stores the data in the Agent Forecast metric in MetricBase
    • Uses forecast properties to set the data collection frequency or time period to store the data. The forecast properties will not be used if a published forecast parameter exists for a data collection definition.