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4.17.0
Australia Patch 5, Australia Patch 4, Australia Patch 3, Australia Patch 1, Australia, Zurich Patch 12, Zurich Patch 11, Zurich Patch 10, Zurich Patch 9, Zurich Patch 7, Zurich Patch 4, Zurich, Yokohama Patch 9, Yokohama Patch 5, Yokohama
Standalone Application
Strategic Planning is a robust planning app to prioritize work, align goals, roadmap, and track progress when using Agile, waterfall, or hybrid approaches.
Strategic Planning, part of Strategic Portfolio Management, provides an end-to-end integrated planning experience that helps you align strategy to execution by enabling business leaders to define and track goals across the organization; gather, review, score and prioritize work that aligns with the strategy, and commit to them once they are on the roadmap, all in a single platform.
Strategic Planning flexible design supports Agile, hybrid, and waterfall planning methodologies and enables planners to visualize, manage, and share their portfolio plans.
Strategic Planning enables creation of multiple scenarios of a portfolio plan to compare and approve an optimal scenario that meets your organizational constraints and helps achieve the desired outcomes.
Product Feedback, a module in Strategic Planning, enables product managers to innovate and drive value through product discovery and customer insights from various sources.
Enterprise Agile Planning, a module in Strategic Planning, enables stakeholders like Portfolio Managers, Solution Train and Agile Release Train Engineers, Product Managers and Scrum Lead/Team Members to manage, prioritize and track work.
Product and portfolio managers can drive organizational alignment while navigating the challenges of agile and product transformations.
- Lenses
- Create portfolio plans using different lenses
- Six predefined lenses are available - Organization, Project Portfolio, Strategic Investments, Product, Goal, Business Capability (only when Enterprise Architecture Workspace is installed) and Value Stream
- Create custom lenses and modify existing lenses
- Five preconfigured custom planning items
- High-level planning
- Create high-level portfolio plans to prioritize and roadmap strategic items such as initiatives, strategic programs, and strategic priorities
- Goals (OKRs)
- Define and manage strategic plans, strategic priorities, goals and targets relevant to your focus area in personalized and shareable boards.
- Generate measurable and quantifiable targets using Now Assist .
- Generate AI powered proactive insights and recommendations for your Goals and targets.
- Define and manage your goals and targets in a portfolio plan to accomplish your organizational plans and drive business outcomes
- Align planning items or other items to the goals and targets of the organization.
- Derive actionable insights on goals and targets from status and progress perspectives using the Goals dashboard.
- Set daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly intervals/breakdowns for long-term targets to easily update and manage the targets in the List view
- Visualize target's progress via graphical representation of target's progress in target sidepanel
- View goals of parent entities in the Hierarchy view for better alignment of goals across teams
- Set both quantitative and qualitative targets
- Automate your target's actual value update from any source such as KPIs, Surveys, etc. on the Now Platform
- Scoring
- Score your work items and strategic items (initiatives and strategic programs) to evaluate, rank, and prioritize them
- Associate a scoring framework to your portfolio plan to score items based on the selected scoring framework
- Score your items in the scoring grid based on OOB frameworks such as RICE, WSJF, and Value vs Effort
- Create your custom scoring framework and define your scoring parameters and formulae to calculate the score of items
- Export planning items data of the portfolio plan to Excel/CSV from the Scoring grid
- Prioritization
- Review the work pipeline using portfolio Prioritization to prioritize work items before you build roadmaps
- Analyze the backlog for your organization using the List, Kanban, and Hierarchy views
- Group, sort, and stack-rank the planning item from the List view
- Visualize the alignment of work to the entities of other lens hierarchies from the Hierarchy view
- Assign ranks to items based on numeric or choice-type planning item attributes in descending and ascending order
- Export planning items data of the portfolio plan to Excel/CSV from the Prioritization grid
- Roadmaps
- Plan prioritized items in the roadmap of your portfolio plan or build free-form roadmaps on any entity of the ServiceNow platform
- Plan effectively using dependencies between items
- Collaborate with different stakeholders on the roadmap and validate common understandings
- View roadmaps in both timeline and Kanban views
- Capacity Planning
- Configure attributes to be used for capacity planning using the planning attributes
- Generate capacity for the teams and different attribute combinations
- Add high-level effort estimates on planning items to create the capacity plans
- Define the set of resources on which you want to create capacity plans
- View the capacity plan by attributes and teams along with the deficit/surplus in one view
- Financials
- View rolled-up financial costs and benefits data of planning items in the new 'Financials' tab to integrate financial insights into your planning and improve decision-making
- Plan financials for Demands, Projects, and Epics with the ability to plan, reforecast the planned cost, and track actual costs of labor and non-labor cost types
- Capture financial baselines manually or automatically through scheduler and compare the data between baselines to analyze changes in financial costs over the work execution
- As a Portfolio manager, approve budget top down or bottom up to planning items like Demands, Projects and Epics by expense type or cost type
- Follow lean budgeting on your agile portfolio plans with the ability to approve and compare budget to agile entities like Epics
- As a planning item owner, compare the latest costs with the approved budget in a detailed view to identify budget over
- Scenario Planning:
- Create multiple scenarios of the changes to a portfolio plan in a simulation mode to try out different combination of prioritized items and their timelines
- Define portfolio budget as the target and do cost-benefit analysis by trying out different budget combination for the work items
- Compare multiple scenarios to analyze the differences in budget, benefits and trade off decisions made between scenarios and determine the best plan
- Approve the optimal scenario to revise the states, budget, and approved dates of live portfolio plan ensuring the creation of an optimal portfolio plan
- View approved scenarios in read only mode for future reference
- Enterprise Agile planning
- Choose from a standard configuration like Full SAFe or configure and set up a team and work structure that works for your organization
- Prioritize and manage planning items and work items like Epics, Capabilities, Features and Stories at various levels from the list view
- Plan and track work and dependencies for Planning intervals and Sprints via the planning board
- Manage the iteration calendars (like Planning interval and Sprint) from the settings
- Keep track of the progress and gain actionable insights for each iteration (planning interval/sprint etc) using comprehensive Dashboards
- Feedback
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- Centralized repository for customer feedback
- Microsoft Outlook add-in for feedback creation and direct forwarding of emails to a preconfigured email address
- Widgets assist in identifying the elements that need attention and determine product performance using sentiments
- Feedback filters to group and sort feedback. Product managers can create and organize product feedback based on the filter criteria helps them look at feedback which is important to them
- Feedback can include an issue, solution, or valuable observation that resonates with all the customers, or need validation from other customers. The user can then take appropriate action, thereby supporting both scenarios effectively
- Create feedback and link single or multiple feedback items with new or existing Product ideas
- Create feedback and link single or multiple feedback items with new or existing Planning items (Epic, Demand, Project)
- Create a product idea and link single or multiple Product ideas to either new or existing feedback
- Create a product idea and link single or multiple Product ideas to either new or existing Planning items (Epic, Demand, or Project)
- Link feedback and Product ideas to any entity (ITSM incident, CSM cases etc.)
- Promote collaboration by preventing multiple teams from building duplicate products to address the same problem using Feedback
- Users can easily determine which product idea is linked to the maximum amount of feedback and prioritize it accordingly
- Demands
- Capture, assess, and prioritize demand requests through configurable playbooks before converting them into work items.
- Track financial estimates, costs, and benefits for demands to support informed funding and approval decisions.
- Summarize demands and identify similar using AI for faster assessment.
- Use Dashboards, with Overview, Financials, and Data Quality tabs, to monitor demand pipeline health and data quality at a glance.
- Diagnostics
- Scripts for admins to identify data discrepancies and validate prerequisite setup to perform high-level strategic planning
- Dashboards
- Use dashboards to view key data and metrics, enabling you to monitor performance, track progress, and make informed decisions related to ideas, feedback, strategy, planning, and execution.
- RIDAC
- Track Risks, Issues, Decisions, Actions, and Changes (RIDAC) for planning items, EAP iterations, and goals from a dedicated L1 menu within the workspace.
- View and manage RIDAC items in a grid with role-based access for viewing and editing.
- Configure the L2 RIDAC menu to view all RIDAC items, project-specific RIDAC, portfolio risks, and program risks.
New:
- Track Risks, Issues, Decisions, Actions, and Changes (RIDAC) for planning items, EAP iterations, and goals directly within Strategic Planning Workspace using related lists and configurable views on record pages, with role-based access for viewing and editing.
- Use the L2 RIDAC menu to view all RIDAC items, project-specific RIDAC, portfolio risks, and program risks. Note that certain fields are read-only during and after creation.
- Updated all references from "Now Assist" to "ServiceNow Otto" across strategic planning modules.
- Role containment is now managed through dedicated configuration files instead of event scripting, simplifying role management.
- The system now tracks how many times users access strategy or goals boards, including actions from the home page and direct board links.
- Added a new EAP role that grants exclusive access to create, edit, or delete planning calendars and spans, and controls access to PI and Sprint actions.
- View the demand summary card on the AI Overview tab of the demand record page when the demand summarization skill is active and accessible.
- View and filter demand data using the Overview, Financials, and Data Quality tabs in Demands Dashboard.
- View and manage cost plans, benefit plans, and baselines from the Financials grid in Demands.
- Switch between the Dashboard and List views in Demands using the breadcrumb navigation.
- View a related list of similar demands on the demand record page for quick access to system-identified matches.
- Explore detailed data directly from the Demands Dashboard widgets using the widget drill-down capability.
Changed:
- Updated all references to "Now Assist" in goal generation and EAP story dictionary records to align with the ServiceNow Otto directive.
Fixed:
- Resolved an issue where the state field in EAP-type demands did not remain in the Completed state after creating an EAP item.
- Resolved alignment issues with non-planning items in Strategic Portfolio Management.
- Resolved an issue where the Hierarchy tab in Enterprise Agile Planning did not display data correctly.
- Resolved an accessibility issue where roadmap keyboard shortcuts appeared as a one-time popup when tabbing through the interface. Shortcuts are now persistently accessible from the side panel.
- Resolved an accessibility issue where the screen reader announced the value of the Rows Per Page dropdown more than once in Portfolio Planning.
Removed:
- Removed the % Complete label from demand bars in the Roadmap tab, demand cards in the Kanban tab, and the % Complete column for demand rows in grid and list views, as demands do not support percent complete calculations.
- Removed the standalone demand summarization component from the demand record page in Next Experience for Demand Management. The summary now appears only within the AI Overview tab.
- Required plugins and products: PPM Standard required for Project Portfolio lens
- Dependencies : Portfolio Planning (sn_align_ws), Goal Framework for SPM (sn_gfa), Value stream artifacts (sn_value_stream), Investment Funding (sn_invst_pln_v2)
- Properties that need to be created or set to activate the content pack
- Affected business rules
- Affected script includes
- .jar files that need to get uploaded, if applicable