Using capacity planning in Portfolio Planning

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Using capacity planning in Portfolio Planning

    Capacity planning in Portfolio Planning enables ServiceNow customers to assess and manage resource capacity effectively. By reviewing resource availability and existing allocations, customers can make informed decisions when assigning resources to prioritized planning items within their portfolios.

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    Manage resource capacity

    The Manage resource capacity screen allows you to generate and view resource capacity details across selected time frames and primary attributes such as groups, roles, or skills. Key capabilities include:

    • Viewing the number of available resources with monthly breakdowns.
    • Saving generated capacity details and regenerating them to reflect the latest updates from employee profile mappings.
    • Filtering resources by specific capacity attributes for targeted views.
    • Selecting resource criteria based on prioritized planning items to focus on relevant groups, roles, or skills.
    • Switching between Auto-select and Manual-select modes to view either all allocated resource efforts or custom data.

    Capacity screen

    The Capacity screen provides a comprehensive overview of resource efforts and allocations for prioritized planning items in the current portfolio. Features include:

    • Interactive Gantt chart to analyze and plan work visually.
    • Color-coded legend indicating resource assignment status:
      • Yellow: Planning items without resource assignments.
      • Blue: Resource estimates within capacity.
      • Red: Overallocation in resource estimates.
      • Green: Resource estimates within capacity (cell highlight).
    • Filtering planning items by type, state, priority, or other attributes to create capacity plans (default filter shows prioritized items only).
    • Viewing total resource capacity and estimates via heatmap and lists, including operational work efforts and estimates outside the portfolio.
    • Redefining workforce criteria for capacity views.

    Operational Resource Assignments

    Resource Managers can create operational resource assignments to account for activities such as meetings, trainings, and time off, which impact available capacity:

    • Operational assignments like training are reflected in the Operational work line item on the Capacity screen (e.g., a 10% training assignment on a 2 FTE group results in 0.2 FTE operational work).
    • Time off assignments reduce total available capacity but do not update the Operational work line item directly (e.g., a 25% time off reduces a 2 FTE group capacity to 1.5 FTE for the specified period).
    • The Operational work line item is visually highlighted in gray for clarity.

    Practical benefits for ServiceNow customers

    By leveraging capacity planning, customers can forecast future resource needs accurately, optimize resource allocation, and identify potential resource overallocations early. This ensures better portfolio management and operational efficiency aligned with organizational priorities.

    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

    Figure 1. Manage resource capacity screen
    Manage resource capacity screen displaying the capacity details for Employee Management group.

    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.
    On the Manage resource capacity screen, you can:
    • 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.

    Resource criteria screen in Capacity.

    Capacity

    Capacity screen displays the resource efforts from the prioritized planning items.
    • 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.

    Capacity view for resource capacity.

    Understanding the Capacity screen.
    Table 1. Capacity legend
    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.
    Using Capacity, you can:
    • View the capacity allocations of prioritized planning items for your current portfolio and better forecast your future resource requirements.
    • Use the filter option (Capacity filter button.) 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.

      Resource capacity 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 (Resource criteria button.)

    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, which is 75% of the total capacity after reducing the 25% time off.

    0.5 FTE, which is 25% of total capacity of the group will be reduced.
    Note:
    The Operational work line item is highlighted in gray color.
    Capacity view showing Operational work in a red highlight box.