0
4.5.0
Yokohama, Xanadu Patch 4, Xanadu, Washington DC Patch 8, Washington DC Patch 4, Washington DC, Vancouver Patch 2
Strategic Planning (formerly known as Alignment Planner Workspace) 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 is a module in Strategic Planning that enables product managers to innovate and drive value through product discovery and customer insights from various sources.
Enterprise Agile Planning is a module in Strategic Planning that 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 your goals and targets in a portfolio plan to accomplish your organizational plans and drive business outcomes
- Align planning items to the goals and targets of the organization
- Display aligned planning items in sidepanel of Goals and Targets
- 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 your portfolio plan in a simulation mode to try out different combination of prioritization lists and planning item timelines
- Review the goals alignment of the in-plan items to ensure delivery of your organizational outcomes
- Compare multiple scenarios between each other to analyze different trade off decisions made between scenarios and determine the best plan
- Approve the optimal scenario to revise the live portfolio plan with the scenario dates as approved dates ensuring the creation of best possible 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
- 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
- Diagnostics:
- Scripts for admins to identify data discrepancies and validate prerequisite setup to perform high-level strategic planning
New
- Lenses
- Align with the business strategy using the Digital Product lens to plan, prioritize, and roadmap work for your digital products
- Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP)
- Accessibility improvements for the configuration panel and the ability to edit important fields of EAP planning items such as State, Planned start date, and Planned end date.
- Support for real-time collaboration in Docs associated with EAP planning items and iterations
- Story generation for epics using Now Assist for SPM. Now Assist uses the epic's name, description, and any existing stories to provide story recommendations. Choose to confirm, combine, split, remove any of the stories, suggest modifications or create more stories. The Story generation skill for EAP is available with Now Assist for SPM, which requires an SPM Pro+ license.
- Financial Planning
- 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
- Analyze financial data for Epics, Demands, and Projects at the portfolio level across varied time scales and ranges for greater flexibility
- Monitor Budget, Forecast, Budget vs Forecast Variance, Planned, Actuals, and Remaining Estimates by expense or cost type to enhance visibility and precision in financial management
- Track Planned, Actuals, and Variance of monetary benefits to maximize ROI and align financial outcomes with business goals
- Record estimates and actuals of monetary and non-monetary benefits for planning items using the new Monetary Benefit Plans and Non-Monetary Benefit Plans tabs on the Record details page
Fixed
- Goals in SPW
- Align work option is disabled for read-only users of the portfolio plan
- Display unique cards for aligned work under Goals when work is tied to multiple targets of the goal
- Refresh issue for the Actuals to Date widget in the Progress tab of the target
- Feedback
- Feedback cards view rendering with images and texts
- Feedback list view deletion fixes
- Graceful handling of access to product feedback collections
- 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