thank you for joining us today I'm Deborah McGrath principal engineer technical product Solutions marketing with servicenow and I'm also the host of our monthly last Thursday's webinars and we're thrilled to be joined by Aaron Roberts one of our awesome service house senior solution Consultants who will discuss and demo Resource Management benefits and best practices to go over our Safe Harbor notice While most of what we'll be discussing and showing you are features that are available with our Utah release this presentation may contain forward-looking statements that reflect the current beliefs of service now all based on current information available actual results May differ materially and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions so let's take a look at our agenda for today during this webinar Aaron will Begin by discussing some of the common questions everyone has when it comes to effective Resource Management followed by an overview of servicenow's answer to those questions she'll then provide a demo of servicenow resource management capabilities and as always we've reserved a few minutes at the end to highlight some key resources and upcoming events as well as for Q a but please feel free to submit your questions in the Q a section during the webinar as well and now I'd like to welcome Aaron thanks Deborah so Erin I've been looking forward to this webinar because it's persistently one of our most popular webinar topics and regardless of whether people are seasoned resource managers and project managers or brand new to Resource Management and maybe just focused on fundamentals everyone seems to have similar challenges and some very common questions about how to do accurate resource planning I agree Resource Management has been such a Hot Topic especially since the pandemic many employees exited the workforce and never returned so a lot of the employers are experiencing a labor shortage so organizations have been having a difficult time finding talents and holding on to their employees so it is really important to stop your resources efficiently in order to do what you need to do and have visibility into what everyone's doing and understand what their workload looks like and also need to be able to Nimble and react to changes so some of the questions that our customers come to us trying to answer is do we know who's working on what project and do we understand our resources skill sets to effectively staff our resources to the right work how can we do more with less and how do we protect our team members from burning out we need to make sure they are not over allocated and lastly understanding the how much work the team is actually putting on planning versus actuals and being able to reflect any changes to the Future projects you know while we can't see our audience I'm sure you're getting a lot of headlines with those questions everybody in agreement what I'd like to know and I'm sure everybody else is how does resource management help so when it comes to service now spms Resource Management really the biggest differentiator is service Now tracks the manages all projects project resources and SPM but not only that it also tracks ITIL processes like handling incidents problems and changes in the itsm side of the platform so strategic work like projects and scrum epics as well as operational work like keeping the lights on tasks all can be managed in one solution in one platform if your staff is spending four hours a day on a project task and four hours a day on working on closing reported issues we're able to see both activities and track hours spent on both type of activities also SPM is true end-to-end Work Management solution so that means you can plan execute and monitor in the same solution which means resource availability and is taken into consideration even before work is approved for execution third SPM allows flexibility when it comes to work methodology not everyone operates in the same way some teams prefer to do their work in waterfall whereas some teams prefer the scrum method and typically these teams work in these separate systems leaving project managers no choice but having to spend unnecessary time pulling data from multiple sources and trying to consolidate it and with SPN we're able to address that issue lastly in our main store release a new project management in Project workspace is introduced and this new feature is going to allow project managers to make a research assignments to the phase or task level of a project and allows them to find the most adequate resource faster and more efficient using attribute-based resource management so Deborah are you familiar with this end-to-end fpm slide that I am presenting on the screen can you tell us a little bit about what where Resource Management fits in this slide um you know at first glance this can seem like a pretty busy slide but actually I think it's a great way to visualize how important resource management is across the entire end-to-end strategic portfolio management process and that's regardless of where you are in terms of maturity whether you're simply consolidating new demands work planning and delivery across a variety of different teams or learning work to strategy so that you have the right resources always focused on the right work and a lot of that might change over time as you encounter change or disruption in the workplace you need that continuous planning to realign those resources or finally just being able to manage the delivery of value across different teams using a variety of different tools and methodologies whether that's traditional project agile hybrid or even external tools like jira and Azure devops effective resource management is really crucial at every step along the way in the whole strategic portfolio management process yeah thank you for that you are right it really plays an important role in every step of the end-to-end Work Management from planning to execution and then also validating the value of the deliverable so when we are talking about resource management process this is a typical process and key Concepts that you have to remember when we're managing our resources in SPM we are first going to start with building resource plans so resource plans are going to be demand managers are going to enable request resources they are going to um work with business stakeholders or demand submitters to estimate the effort for the work that might be approved for execution then we're going to move on to preview and analyze so typically you're going to work with the team leads or Department leads that's going to work on this project and we're going to make sure that we have the right resources estimated and assigned to a project then we're going to request the resources to your resource manager make sure that we have availability in the capacity is taken into consideration before the resource can start working on this project we're going to confirm and allocate so confirm you're going to just soft allocate and then once you allocate and hard book the resources the task is going to be visible to the resource assigned assignee and they are going to be able to review that on their calendar and managing change is so important we are always dealing with changes someone may leave or you know there is a organizational structure restructure and then we need to be able to be nimble and then make those changes and reflect that viewing up-to-date resource availabilities um key in effective resource management really understanding true availability across all resources for more precise allocation precise allocation start with calculating the correct availability we're going to start with capacity of a resource we're going to take ptos you know vacations sick time any type of leaves out of that calculation we're also going to look at admin tasks like meetings and calls and then operation work so if someone is working on incident problems you know they are splitting their time between Project work and operation work we want to have visibility into how much time they're allocated for operations work and lastly planned work right so the projects from tasks Stories the ones that we are planning um and then allocating to our resources and once all of the allocation is um taken out from the capacity that's how we can calculate correct availability lastly once availability is um we're able to see the resources availability we are allocating work to our resources we're going to allow your resources to report and record time spent on tasks on a day-to-day basis and submit timesheets in a single step couple things that you want to consider is you know who's going to be approving time cards is that going to be users managers project managers is it going to be Auto approvals what project time categories will be needed a couple things that we want to consider that to make sure to you know allow efficient time management so once a resource team member submits a timeline or time card that we're going to be able to track actuals and be able to compare that to the planned all right now we're going to jump into my demo instance and we're going to show you a demo okay we're going to start with a new demand here so this is where we want to start thinking about your resource requirements um a couple things that you want to consider maybe is you know automating some of these resource management process you know rely and build a flow designer flows to automate resource requests you know based on the type of a project type of a work that you're going to be requesting you can also use demand task to send a task out to your resource manager requesting research estimates so before even building your resource plan you want to get your resource manager involved and get their intake get their take on what the estimate should be so you can build a demand task to get the resource managers involved next we're going to create a new resource plan so I went ahead and created a new one here if we click on the manage button we can jump over to the resource plan console not only I'm able to see who we are asking for so in this case we're asking analysts to spend 100 hours to support this project but we can also review what that resource group's availability looks like so this is for you to preview and analyze before sending the requests to your research manager let's evaluate and make sure the people that you're asking to work on this project is available for the timeline you're looking at um for Peter I can drill in and find out hey Peter is spending 130 hours in July on operational work that's why his availability is so limited what we want to do next is we're going to go back I confirmed that you know even though Peter might be unavailable but there are a bunch of other team members within the group that is available to support my demands so man manager can request this resource plan and this can trigger a alert to your resource manager to review this resource plan resource request and then start working on allocating a right staff to this resource plan do jump over to the resource managers consider building a dashboard for your resource manager so they don't have to be constantly looking at their emails and being bombarded with email requests you can build a simple dashboard for them to check in and see how many requests are sitting in my inbox and they can drill into any of these widgets to find out what are the requests that they need to work on also consider using different resource reports available this is an example of a out of dash out of box reports you can use it to run availability reports utilization or even reviewing allocation of a certain room so for this case we want to look at what our analysts group is doing I'm going to run the report here and this show is for the timeline that we selected and what's the group's availability as well as what is being requested confirmed allocated I can enable any of these other metrics or attributes to the report as well so we can see that this group is fairly allocated and almost over allocated for the later part of the year next we want to um we want to go ahead and allocate our um our locate hours to our resources so we're going to jump over to allocation board Rosie resource manager is going to drill into your custom board so this was built for a particular group but this can be created and tailored to meet the criteria the resource manager wants to focus on so maybe based on the number of users or I set up users that they want to work on or just a group or role based so it's very flexible and we're going to drill into what is being requested we're going to see that last Thursday demo the one that we're looking at it's been requested and we are able to confirm or allocate so confirm soft booking whereas allocate hard booking and now you are allocating the resources to this particular project and then it's going to show up on their calendar um let's see so I'm gonna go ahead and select Peter here and then go ahead and confirm okay so he's been confirmed and then we can also go ahead and allocate all right so that took care of reviewing um the requested groups availability their allocation current allocation finding the member of that group with most availability or who fits for this um for this work and then we selected an individual team member and allocated hours to this team member what we want to do next is we are going to Now log in as T Peter and we're going to open up our timesheet portal I'm going to go ahead and refresh my portal um so what he's going to see is what he's allocated for the time for the week that he's about he's submitting the time the card for so for this week the June 25th to July 1st he's allocated to a particular project from the task view I can select the project or work that I've spent time on I'm going to add to my timesheet just simply type in the number of hours I spent and then go ahead and submit it based on the workflow that's defined by the team this is going to either be Auto approved or go to a project or Peter's manager for approval so that was the end to end demo for a quick and to end demo from planning to allocating an assignment and then also allowing your team members to report their time spent on the project so I'm going to send it back to you Deborah so Aaron would you be able to show us the enhancements to project workspace that make it easier to manage resources some of the questions that have been coming in have been hesitant to answer just because we're doing an awful lot of work on Resource Management Aaron can give you a little taste of some of what's coming we will make sure to revisit this going forward yeah definitely so we'll do a high level overview of what was introduced in the main store release so what you're going to see here is the project the next Experience Project workspace so I'm in the planning console here and you can see we have the work breakdown structure all the tasks that are listed and couple things that you can see that is different from our classic or the first version of project workspaces resource plan so I can enable that to add our resource assignment to pay to the bottom here another thing that I want to point out and I'll get to this as well but I can drill into my resource assignee which I added a column um to the work breakdown breakdown structure is I can type in the resource that I'm looking for um you know able tutor or I could also look for a particular group as well so it is you know group um and as well as the individual team members all from the same column um so if I go down to the bottom of the um pane here what you're going to see is I'm able to add a resource and once I add a resource Line This is going to enable me to find a you know most adequate resource for this particular um task actually for this Base gate using any of the attributes hey do you want to look for um the you know perfect resource by the resources name or do we want to look at it by the group or skill sets employee type I know a lot of customers have been asking how can I see you know which full-time employees are available versus temporary employees I'm able to see that as well and let's take a look at just by looking at and scrolling down at the list of the team members available you can quickly tell who is available just support this task right so for Alejandro's for example he's got seven hours available for the week that this task is scheduled for let's go ahead and just select him for now and what we want to show you here is for the week this task is scheduled for he is available for eight hours um and so we are good to um schedule him whereas you know if I'm selecting anyone else maybe then you may have Adela who's over allocated and let's find her and you're going to be able to see that let's see and Aaron as you're looking for that I just want to make a comment here we're looking at you know just a traditional project phase like the quality gate too but conceivably quality Gate 3 the execution phase some of those resources could actually be working in jira but you could still allocate them here right so even if they're working on an agile project or maybe they're safe they could also be potentially If This Were a hybrid project that's where I'm going with that yep correct so um I apologize so for yeah um finding a you know resource that may not have availability you're going to see that in the allocation heat map so it's very easy to tell who is available um to support this task that we are trying to staff you know they're by using the allocation heat map so that's where I'm going to end it here but um I think there's going to be another session in the near future to do a deep dive on this particular topic so keep your eyes on out for that yeah Aaron appreciate that as a matter of fact we might even ask you to come back and what we might do is have somebody from our product management team join you as well because as I said there are a lot of new features coming out specific to Resource Management resource capacity planning later this summer Erin thank you so much for that great discussion and the demo of servicenow resource management next up we've got several events and resources that we'd like to share with you on Thursday July 27th our monthly last Thursday's webinar will be 30 minutes with Fred Champlain discussing digital transformation was safe and Fred if you've ever heard him he's incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about all things agile and safe so you don't want to miss this webinar just before that on July 18th we have two events live on now will present an application portfolio management webinar establishing your technology reference model and also on July 18th we have a workshop to learn how to implement SPM benchmarking you can register for any of these live on servicenow events at community.servicenow.com under events please note that you can view this Resource Management webinar again and access any of our prior last Thursday's webinars on demand from our YouTube playlist last Thursdays with SPM webinars in terms of resources please check out our product page which is servicenow.com products slash resource hyphen management for resources including datasheet ebooks solution briefs we just have a couple minutes to turn to our q a to see if there are any specific questions there are a couple that came in that I thought might be worth repeating when should we start assigning resources to demands and depending on your demand process for certain types of Demands it can be as early as when that demand is submitted and what might be recommended there is a t-shirt sizing whether it's small medium or large it's a great way to start gauging and being able to compare demands against one another and maybe that can be refined as that goes along in the process anything to add to that Aaron no I agree so typically in the demand phase yeah we want to keep it broad we want to look at you know which roles and which groups are required for supporting this work um because we may not find the funding we may not have it available um or you know not find it appropriate to support so you want to keep it General and when it comes to once the demand is approved then we are going to actually allocate funding to support that demand or support that work that's when you want to identify which role or which person individual team member should be assigned and work on that so that's another thing that I just wanted to add there one of the questions though Aaron was on operational plans how would you allocate resources to operations type tasks you can set up operational plans as well similar to the way that you would set up your strategic resource plans yes you're going to be able to set up operation users plan for anyone that's considered as resource so it could be a safe team member or it could be you know scrum team member project team member as long as they are in the resource table we're going to be able to create a resource plan for those um those team members so it's regardless of what methodology the team is using thank you so much Erin much appreciated thank you to my co-producer John Lim and most of all thank you all for joining us today hope to see you at our next last Thursday's webinar in July