Optimize resource allocation and eliminate capacity bottlenecks across your portfolio.
Organizations struggling with resource allocation often face the same recurring challenges:
- Teams are overloaded,
- Managers struggle to track capacity utilization effectively,
- Limited visibility into the effort spent on strategic work versus operational tasks.
This creates a cascade of problems that undermines project delivery and strategic initiatives.
Capture SmartStart, our proven service package, now offers the exact 4-week implementation, including Resource Management within ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management, providing immediate clarity and control over your most valuable asset: your PEOPLE.
In this article, you will discover how:
- Capture SmartStart facilitates Resource Management within organizations by providing out-of-the-box capabilities.
- A clear implementation path based on ServiceNow SPM in just 4 weeks, where one week is dedicated to Resource and Portfolio Management.
What is Resource Management?
Resource Management is the strategic capability to effectively plan, allocate, and optimize human resources across projects, demands, and operational activities. It provides visibility into capacity, utilization, and resource bottlenecks while enabling data-driven decisions about resource allocation and investment.
Its key benefits include:
- Enhanced visibility into resource capacity and utilization across teams and roles or overall departments.
- Improved forecasting through actual vs. estimated effort tracking.
- Strategic alignment by prioritizing resource allocation to high-value initiatives.
- Bottleneck identification to proactively address capacity constraints.
- Cost optimization through better resource planning and allocation decisions.
Resource Management brings value across the entire organization, enabling project managers to secure the right resources at the right time, while giving executives portfolio-level insights into resource constraints and investment decisions.
It also enhances Project Portfolio Management by ensuring realistic resource planning, enabling scenario modeling for capacity planning, and providing the foundation for reliable project delivery commitments.
The Capture SmartStart Advantage
It has never been easier! We have combined our 15+ years of experience, filled with various implementation cases, to help you establish or improve your Resource Management process in the most effective way possible.
With our Capture SmartStart package, you can be up and running in one week.
How is this possible?
- Pre-configured workflows for resource requests and assignments.
- Ready-to-use dashboards with capacity heatmaps and utilization analytics.
- Comprehensive Success Playbook with defined roles, processes, and governance.
- Role-based training tailored to resource managers, project managers, and finance controllers.
- Best practice configurations based on proven implementation patterns.
We aim to guide you effectively using the ServiceNow SPM Resource Management platform.
Our comprehensive Success Playbook is based on the 3 critical components of effective operation: People (Roles), Processes, and Technology/Tools.
This unique approach enables organizations to launch their Resource Management initiatives effectively from day one and seamlessly scale as their needs evolve.
Ready to transform your Strategic Portfolio Management in just 4 weeks?
Solving Real Resource Management Challenges
The Challenge: Resource Overload and Poor Visibility
Teams are overloaded, and managers struggle to track capacity utilization and the effort spent on strategic work. Without proper resource management, organizations face:
- Resource conflicts when multiple projects compete for the same skills.
- Overallocation leading to burnout and reduced quality.
- Poor forecasting due to lack of historical effort data.
- Strategic misalignment when operational work crowds out strategic initiatives.
The Solution: Integrated Resource Planning and Tracking
Our Capture SmartStart approach addresses these challenges through three core capabilities:
- Resource Request & Assignment Workflow:
Project managers can request specific skills or named individuals, while resource managers allocate resources based on availability and role fit. This creates a structured approach to resource allocation that balances project needs with capacity constraints.
- Capacity Planning by Role or Team:
Visual heatmaps help identify over- and under-utilized resources across portfolios, enabling proactive capacity management and strategic resource investment decisions.
- Effort Tracking with Timecards:
Users submit weekly timecards directly linked to projects, demands, or operational tasks. Managers can compare estimated vs. actual hours to improve future forecasting and ensure accountability.
Key Configurations We Deliver
The implementation includes these essential configurations:
- Enable capacity planning by role, team, and department levels.
- Configure Resource Request & Assignment Workflows with approval processes.
- Set up Timecard Management including categories, approval flows, and automated reminders.
- Implement yearly & multi-year planning for both financial and resource forecasting.
- Enable top-down planning vs. bottom-up forecast alignment for realistic capacity planning.
- Set up portfolio control dashboards showing cost, resources, and project health metrics.
- Document the complete resource management process in the Success Playbook.
- Deliver comprehensive training for resource managers, project managers and finance controllers.
The Process
The Resource Management Process provides you with:
The Resource Management application enables resource requesters, such as project managers or change managers, to create resource assignments, request resources, and analyze resource availability and utilization across the portfolio.
- Resource managers use the application to allocate resources to tasks, working with any task on the platform, including project tasks, incidents, problems, or changes.
- Resource requesters can create resource assignments that specify group or user resources required by tasks. They can verify resource availability and make adjustments to their resource assignments before submitting formal requests.
- Resource managers gain visibility into capacity, availability, existing allocations, and utilization for requested resources, enabling informed allocation decisions based on actual resource capacity and strategic priorities.
- Resource managers can adjust resource assignment dates, resources, requested hours, and proposed allocations to optimize resource utilization across the entire portfolio.
Right-Sizing Your Resource Management Approach
We often see that organizations have different scopes for resource management. For larger organizations just starting their resource management journey, individual-level resource management is usually overkill and requires too much administration to reap meaningful benefits.
Bigger organizations typically want to identify bottlenecks at a higher level to determine where they will encounter challenges when working on projects or agile tasks within specific roadmaps or portfolios. This means that, depending on organizational structure, we can allocate resources based on:
- Organizational structure (departments, business units).
- Role-based allocation (architects, developers, analysts).
- Team-based allocation for agile delivery organizations.
At a high level, this approach helps determine where to add more internal or external resources to complete roadmap elements on time and within scope. For more advanced organizations, individual resource-level planning with skills tracking remains possible, with information automatically aggregated to department, role, or team levels for executive visibility.
Booking Managers: Streamlining Administration
From a process perspective, we sometimes utilize booking managers to ease administration overhead. These managers can:
- Schedule interviews with project or product managers to discuss resource requirements.
- Input required dates and specifications into the system based on structured conversations.
- Conduct allocation meetings with resource managers to make individual bookings for specific resource requests.
- Ensure data consistency and reduce the administrative burden on project teams.
This approach helps drive adoption while avoiding data inconsistencies that often plague resource management implementations.
The Tools: ServiceNow SPM Resource Management
A centralized software solution is crucial for supporting Resource Management capabilities. Capture SmartStart optimizes the ServiceNow SPM platform's feature-rich interface for aligned and practical usage, adjusted to the roles and processes described in the Success Playbook.
The Resource Management Workspace provides a central location for viewing and managing resource allocation, capacity planning, and utilization analytics in real-time, giving resource managers the visibility they need to make informed decisions.
Get Started with Resource Management
The Capture SmartStart Resource Management offering provides a Success Playbook with well-defined roles and processes for efficiency and consistency, plus a centralized, easy-to-use platform for effective resource planning and allocation. Our offering enables organizations of all sizes to optimize resource utilization, eliminate bottlenecks, and ensure strategic initiatives receive the resources they need to succeed.
Ready to transform your Strategic Portfolio Management in just 4 weeks?
More about Capture SmartStart
Did you miss our previous articles on Idea & Demand Management and Project Management? Read them now and stay tuned for the next episode of the Capture SmartStart series.