thank you for joining our new Resource Management capabilities webinar today I'm Deborah McGrath principal product marketing engineer with service now and last Thursday's webinars host and presenting today is service now Chris canel who's a senior manager inbound product management and he guides the development of our Resource Management product and we're very happy to welcome back Aon Roberts Erin is a senior solution consultant with service now who presented Resource Management back in our June webinar resource management benefits and best practices and back in June we knew we had some great new Resource Management capabilities coming out and promised you all a follow-up webinar focused on that so let's get going with it while most of what we'll be presenting is currently available I'd like to point out our Safe Harbor notice that this presentation may contain forward-looking statements that reflect the current beliefs of service now all are based on current information available but actual results major for materially and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions so today's webinar will include a discussion of our longer term vision for the resource management solution we'll also see the new Resource Management capabilities in the new project workspace application eron gave us a sneak peek at that back in June and we'll revisit that we're super excited to hear about the plans for a new Resource Management workspace and we'll show you the brand new strategic capacity planning capabilities now available with our strategic planning workspace we'll then highlight some very popular upcoming SPM and APM events that you'll definitely want to put on your calendars and of course we'll close with a brief Q&A but please feel free to submit your questions during the webinar as well so welcome Chris and welcome back Aaron thank you very much I'm very happy to be here and uh thank you for giving us some time to share the present as well as the the future of where we are headed with Resource Management so I I wanted to start with a just a brief discussion and a slide that shows our vision you know across the top I have it's about the end because often or sometimes you can run into a situation where while everybody wants to move that upper right and have that strategic vision and be able to make those great uh decisions about when they can take work on and what is going to be required in order to make sure that things can happen there's often this siloed experience between at the lower left you know the project managers are doing or what your agile team leads are doing or more in the middle what your managers of resources not just resource managers but people who care about resources maybe they're a product manager or a program manager who want to know about the various other work that people are doing beyond the work in order to enable their program or their product while we want to help everybody move to that upper left we understand that we can't have a siloed experience and we need to make sure that at that lower left area that we give users a easily adoptable experience you know reduce the clicks make it easy to understand self-learning is a big uh thing that we focus on especially within our design partner groups and by the way if any of these four areas interest you be a member of one of our design partner groups please reach out to Haley Alexander and we will try to get you onto one of these uh design partner groups as soon as possible so that you can help shape the future of where we are headed briefly from the lower left to that aspirational upper right we start with what the project managers are doing and their need to create easy assignments but also easy update of assignments as the project changes as the as as the stories that are being worked on during the Epic change make it easier for those changes to take place so that at the mid level midlevel management level uh your program managers your product managers your res resource managers they are able to get a good vision of the people that they care about what they're up to and again uh you know it's a it's a feedback loop between the Middle area and the bottom left just like there's a feedback between the upper right and the lower left so you know if we can get good actionable data to the upper right then the executives can make good decisions about what their business units are up to or what they're you know during Pi planning what people are going to be working on and which uh teams will take on which activities I'm going to go through three areas starting with the lower left Aon did a presentation that showed off the May relase functionality on a previous last Thursday call so instead of a a demo of what's new in Project workspace around resource assignments I'm just going to speak briefly to the functionality that was added this slide probably covers uh I guess you could say 80% of what our design partners and the pack is most excited about in May when you were selecting a resource you were able to see how much time that resource had available to them before taking on the work but you would still see different colors that would indicate whether or not you were having a problem or not what we added with August was the ability to click within that heat map and on a week by week or month-by-month basis you will be able to find out okay if I want Addison Mueller for example and even though I only need Addison for 17 hours she's showing as as uh red why is she showing as red and I can see that she's working on my project but she's also doing some operational work and working on a another project and I would also be able to see if there are demand if there's Demand work or epic work that Addison is working on so you're able to see across the board everything that they're doing similarly if I you know you may notice that the name in the owner column is a clickable blue URL if you have teams enabled you can click on that person's name and have a conversation with them about how to resolve this overutilization and this is because we've you we heard loud and clear from our end users that while they like having a resource manager able to solve the problems or act as a final arbiter in the event a problem can't be solved they wanted to give the project managers and the people that are involved in the actual work the opportunity to resolve it on their own more than once when I was a project manager I liked being able to just reach out to and I was in a high Communication company I could just reach out to one of those other project managers and say hey Bill I really need Addison's time it's showing as if you are using Addison at 50% of her time do you really need her for that amount of time is that a mistake and hopefully we can work it out as project managers but if not then we can escalate it up to the resource manager so again we're not taking anything away from resource managers we're just trying to give more ability to control things and more ability to make fast adjustments to the project managers so um this really is something that uh has has been very well received from our like I said our design partners and the pack and hopefully this is something that people will be able to leverage almost right away some other functionality that we added once they had gone through the process of getting people assigned and having these assignments approved if something changed where some you know something was delayed and an assignment needed to be pushed out into the future or the task itself the entire project was delayed and there was some sort of Downstream impact due to finish to start constraints it led to a situation where a lot of these assignments had to be recreated from scratch what we have now is is a functionality where in the event you move a task which causes other Downstream tasks to move with it then any of those assignments they will also move with the task um similarly if those tasks like you know on screen here we can see that Andy had been requested and um you know you if if that assignment had been approved then whenever that assignment moves the approval State changes as well so again we want to make it possible for the project manager to say I no longer need somebody during this week I now need them during a different week without a whole lot of paperwork requirements or a heavy process being involved but instead it's a simple process but it does call out to the resource manager hey this thing that you previously approved you need to reapproved because it changed right and uh even if the resource manager doesn't approve it this was something that we heard was even if something just has a state of pending the resource managers maybe don't want to have to approve every single resource request sometimes they only want to tackle the resource requests when there are Collision States so we've tried to do that as well to to again take some of the process requirements off of the hand of the resource man off of the heads of the resource managers so can only handle collisions where people can't work it out on their own that was something that we we heard loud and clear as a request that said we also know that there are some clients especially our clients that are very early in maturity or very large and very heavy in process where they don't want project managers to say who they want they want them to only say which type of person they want and we have that ability now as well so again it's we we're trying to answer both worlds here and we didn't have this in May because we were going for the majority use case but now we're handling a large minority use case with this capability where if you are at one of those companies typically Healthcare or petroleum where you have a project manager and they can say I need a person from a team or I need a specific role or group or location to be involved in the work they can build out that need but they can't actually pick a name right here only the resource manager can pick a name for them and then once the name is there they can change the assignment just like before they can change the duration of the assignment and that state will change from approved back to pending but they can't remove someone from their project and they can't add a named person to their project they can just describe what their need is and like I said that is that is to handle those High process or low maturity clients and that was again something a lot of this a lot of these uh needs come directly from our sessions uh with our our design partner groups or the pack we have a strong goal of uh you know continuous development and so rather than making up our minds about what we're going to build and then building it we work with clients to find out what the clients want next we start working on it we show it to them while we're building it and then we release it hopefully to good positive reactions which I you know pretty much everything in the May release got very good positive reactions from the uh design groups this last uh capability from August this is something where again the surveys from the design Partners in the pack clearly called out we like what you're doing in Project workspace but we are h heavy users of Demands we don't want to have to recreate the uh effort requirements from our demands in projects and so we added the ability to do resource assignments in demands and when those demands convert to a project those resource assignments will then become demands for resources resource assignments within the new project here's an example where a demand had for named res resources on it and they can be named resources or types of people and then after they are uh the project was converted you can see that those people showed up as a state demand we received very passionate feedback about allocation workbench and we are replacing allocation workbench with this new Resource Management workspace it's going to give you the ability to say here are the people that I care about just you can describe the people or call them out by name it's going to show you the people it's going to tell you all the work that they are doing and then you can say now show me the work that they could be fulfilling and you will have the ability to either move work between resources such as between Haley and Daryl in this example or you can say that unassigned work increased personalization design that is extremely important I want to take that body of work and move it up and assign that to Catherine but there's some other body of work that maybe isn't as important and I want to move it down and Market is unassigned so this will give the resource manager sort of a One-Stop shop to make all the changes that they need to make and all the approvals that they want to make because again you don't have to do approvals but some people want to similarly if you are not a resource manager but you are a project manager and you want to look at all the people working on your projects and know what else they're doing or a program or a product manager and you want to see what they're up to you can do that here uh this also satisfies one use case from a client where they said our Executives want to see the near-term impact on people of their strategic decisions and this is absolutely the place to go and and see that information so while this is called the resource management workspace it is not the resource manager workspace it is for more than just resource managers the last thing I want to touch on before Aon takes over is the new strategic capacity planning page that we added in August and we will be continuing to improve that for the next several releases so just like it says here again you can read faster than I can talk I think that uh the the green text in the little blue box really captures the main goal of strategic capacity planning which is do we have enough of the right types of people to take on the work or to achieve or deliver on the work that we have taken on or is there some kind of a problem and so again this first release is really the Persona that we are aiming at the first release is the business unit owner who you know in a typical it type of environment the business says what they want now the it business unit owner is going to move and rack and stack work across different roles or move work in and out in order to figure out if they can do it the next you know the follow on releases will be adding things like iconography and some assisted intelligence to help make better decisions it will also be helping out personas again such as product managers or program managers who maybe don't own resources and can't move things left and right or up and down but they want to have visibility to problems so they they can turn around and reach out to people to ask good solid questions so you know the goal here is regardless of the methodology that you're following we want to streamline that capacity planning process process for the prioritized work that you've got into portfolios in a visual way because most people are visual so that you can do these uh planning capabilities we also kept everything as you can probably tell across the board for all three of these uh uh s all three of these uh areas people are used to excel people like a gri view we understand that we respect that and you know we we have a nod to the new but also a nod to to The Familiar that pretty much covers what I wanted to discuss is far as what we released in August and where we are headed in the future and with that I'm going to turn it over to Erin thanks Chris I'm very excited to present and demo capacity planning I've had a lot of customers in the past asking for a capability like this so I think um a lot of the customers will find this very useful so our demo is going to start in our strategic planning workspace so if you're not familiar with um um spw this is for your portfolio manager managers and product managers and I think of this as a One-Stop shop so this is where you're going to go to understand the goals and targets that you're trying to work towards uh be able to see all the planning items regardless of the um method like agile um safe you can see demands as well as projects or even custom planning items allow you to prioritize and then also share road map so as part of um spw we're going to find one of the portfolios here and there are many YouTube videos out there um doing a deep dive of this particular capabilities so if you're not familiar I encourage you to go um find a other videos um so you can learn more about spw so once I open one of the portfolio plans I'm going to be able to see all the planning items that's aligned to this particular portfolio plan you're going to notice that I have projects demands as well as epics some of these items are prioritized and that's when you're going to see these items appear on your road map as well as capacity planning you have a lot of metrics of each item that's going to help you prioritize um so I do want to kind of point out that there are other items you can consider before making a decision on which items you're going to prioritize I'm going to drill into one of these items here this is going to take me to um a Details page of the item and over here we have resource assignment you can create new resource assignment and um for this planning item this is really at the high level so you're not particular you're not necessarily finding a user um it might be at the role in um group level so if you are um trying to do a resource planning or create a resource assignment at a project phase or a project task we encourage you to use the project workpace for managing your resources but for portfolio managers that's kind of um you know really paying attention to the highlevel um resource management or resource allocation this could be a good way to create new resource assignments so we see that we have certain groups that we are requesting for this particular item here now I'm going to go back and then we're going to switch over to capacity planning down here uh in the lower pane you're going to notice that we have a lot of planning items listed these are the ones that um are prioritized in the prioritization list um this is in the same order as um the ranking of these items so you can change the order of the planning items and what you're going to see here is up at the top length top pane these are the RO groups and roles skill sets that these planning items are asking for we can focus on just the group level or um consider the roles and skill sets that um each planning item is ask for we're going to now just focus in the groups here as I'm clicking on one of these items this is going to change the view and show me which teams that we are asking and how many hours that the research assignments um of this planning item is including I can drill into one of the um groups and then under the group I am able to see all the projects demand as well as other items that's not part of this portfolio plan so we can take a look at the breakouts of all the um items that's going to um request and use the you know Erp teams resources another thing that's really um neat about capacity planning view here is you can make changes directly to the planning items so we can change the timeline of these planning items to see what kind of Downstream impact those changes going to have to your resource allocation so I can drag my items so as I'm changing or updating my items timeline view you're you're going to notice that as I moved my demand timeline from initial um start date of April to September um until then we didn't have any issues on our heat map here um everyone was utilized to the right level no one was over utilized but as I'm changing the view of or change the timeline of my demand you're going to notice that now my team the Erp team is going to be over utilized um because if I let's do this drill into the Erp team um As I Am shifting my demands timeline we're going to be requesting um there are going to be a lot more planning items that's requesting for YY T teams time and that's going to cause some issues so as a portfolio manager's perspective this is extremely helpful so these are all the items that we are planning within my portfolio or even within my product level product um what are some of the cons do we have the right people to work on all these projects or all these items and then how maybe these changes that we're considering or planning on making are going to have impact on our resource allocation and that's the end of the demo I hope you find this helpful and I'm going to um pass it back to Deborah thank you so much Erin and thank you Chris speaking from personal experience I think it's just awesome that we've streamlined help project managers can more easily interact with resource managers to assign those project resources and I'm super excited for the beautiful new Resource Management workspace we have three important events first is our biannual SPM Vision series on Thursday September 21st this was previously called our SPM Summit and we renamed it to reflect the focus on what our customers have accomplished and plan to achieve with existing new and planned SPM capabilities the same thing goes for our APM Vision series that's on Tuesday September 26th both of these events include a keynote address by yoav Boaz who's our VP and general manager of the SPM APM business unit it also includes vision and product roadmap by the directors of the inbound product management team and really compelling customer stories and customer panel discussions the SPM Vision series will include a really cool generative AI demo showing the potential of SPM with a so definitely put those on your calendars and of course please join us for our next last Thursday's webinar on Thursday September 28th when you'll learn how you can leverage SPM along with APM and it Asset Management to rationalize your technology spend for cost optimization and efficiency and this solution focused webinar will be the first in a series of quarterly last Thursday's webinars where we'll start to discuss and demo how you can achieve greater business value with SPM and or APM seamlessly integrated with other capabilities across the M platform please note that you can view this webinar again and access any of our prior last Thursday's webinars on our YouTube Last Thursdays with SPM playlist and use the tiny URL in the blue box in the upper right corner of the screen and you can register for any of our SPM and APM live on service now events all in one place at community. servicenow.com under events so we're going to turn now to our Q&A Chris and Aaron I'm going to let you take over here and pick and choose the questions that we need to get to Great I I think I've taken care of the questions in chat but my goodness there's 21 in Q&A okay exactly we get another spot sure uh so someone asked about a resource allocation being automated when whenever you create a resource assignment and so I and it's not an allocation anymore it's an assignment by default it will assume one FTE peanut butter spr spread for the duration of the project phase task wherever you're creating that assignment if you want to though you can change that you can change the start or end date or you can change the amount of that uh need from 1 to 0.5 or from 25 hours to 40 hours also you can double click in those cells just like you can single click to see more information you can double click in those cells if you want to build a profile demand curve because you need somebody for four or five weeks but you need them more during the first week then a little bit less then a little bit less then a little bit less so you can build those profile demand curves any plans to include resource plans in a planning state in resource reports I would say possibly yes that is actually a fantastic question because I'm going to use that as a lead in to uh let you know that Haley has planned a lot of work in 2024 focused on new reports especially on status reports and putting she's putting together a group of clients again that continuous Discovery so that is something where I can't say the specific report that you're asking about yes or no but I could absolutely say that that reporting at the project level to help out project managers is definitely one of the uh big items that we were focused on in 20124 and if you are able to join that DPP and provide your input it would be greatly appreciated thank you so much Chris canel and Erin Roberts once again thank you to my last Thursday's co-producer John Lim and much appreciation to our last Thursday's audience for joining us we hope we'll see you in September for all our events