Using capacity planning in Portfolio Planning
Summarize
Summary of Using capacity planning in Portfolio Planning
Capacity planning in Portfolio Planning enables ServiceNow customers to assess resource availability and manage allocations effectively within their portfolios. It provides detailed insights into resource capacity mapped to prioritized planning items, helping resource managers make informed decisions when assigning work and forecasting future requirements.
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Manage Resource Capacity
The Manage Resource Capacity screen allows you to:
- Select a specific 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 options to regenerate for the latest updates based on employee profile mappings.
- Filter resources by capacity attributes within a date range to understand availability.
- Switch between auto-select and manual-select modes to view allocated resource efforts across all or custom planning items.
This screen provides a monthly breakdown of total available resources and the latest generation date of capacity data, ensuring up-to-date capacity monitoring.
Capacity Planning Screen
The Capacity Planning screen offers a comprehensive view of resource capacity and allocations for prioritized planning items, featuring:
- An interactive Gantt chart showing planning items and their resource assignments.
- Color-coded indicators for resource allocation status:
- Yellow: Planning items without resource assignments.
- Blue: Estimates within resource capacity.
- Red: Overallocation in resource estimates.
- Green: Estimates within resource capacity in cells.
- Filter options to view planning items by type, state, priority, and other attributes, with the default set to prioritized items only.
- Heatmap views displaying total resource capacity and estimates.
- Additional items list showing efforts for operational work and estimates outside the portfolio.
- Ability to redefine workforce criteria for refined capacity planning.
Operational Resource Assignments
Resource Managers can create or migrate operational resource assignments to account for activities such as meetings, training, and time off, which affect available capacity:
- Operational assignments (e.g., 10% capacity for training) are reflected in the "Operational work" line item, representing the proportion of capacity allocated.
- Time off assignments reduce the total available capacity but do not appear in the Operational work line item. For example, a 25% time off for a quarter reduces available capacity accordingly.
- The Operational work line item is visually highlighted in gray for clarity.
Practical Benefits
- Helps forecast and manage resource needs accurately by providing real-time capacity data.
- Supports detailed analysis and planning through interactive visualizations and filtering.
- Enables balanced workload distribution by identifying overallocation and resource gaps early.
- Improves alignment between operational demands and project planning, ensuring realistic capacity utilization.
Assess the resource capacity and review existing allocations, which help you to make informed decisions while working on assigning resources.
Use the manage resource capacity screen to generate resource capacity details.
Use the Capacity Planning 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 Planning
- 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 Planning
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 Planning 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, which is 75% of the total capacity after reducing the 25% time off.