Exploring Portfolio Planning in Strategic Planning Workspace
Learn about the features, functionality, and the business value that Strategic Planning provides.
Strategic Planning overview
Strategic Planning uses Lenses to help you plan work for your company in a delivery perspective of your choice. Personalized portfolio plans that are created using a lens help you cascade the plans from the enterprise level down through portfolios and products or align work with an organizational goal or a value stream. Prioritize and roadmap relevant work, thus aligning the right execution teams to the right strategy.
After strategic plans are broken down into planning items such as projects or epics, you can schedule these items into your product or portfolio roadmaps. Using hybrid roadmaps, you can roll up both Waterfall and Agile work items to a shared initiative. You can also plan capacity and financials for each of these planning items all from a single workspace.
From the following table, learn about features of Strategic Planning in detail and how they enable managers to draw effective plans and drive agile transformation across the company.
Features and Benefits
| Feature | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Lens | Choose a planning perspective to prioritize, fund, and align your work. |
| Lens configuration | Use six predefined lenses or create custom lenses. |
| Portfolio plans | Enable focused planning of work in the desired lens to align with strategy and drive shared outcomes. |
| High-level portfolio plans | Prioritize and roadmap work at a high-level by building portfolio plans for strategic items such as initiatives. |
| Planning items | Plan work in the form of projects, epics, demands, or a custom type to suit traditional, Agile, or hybrid approaches. |
| Prioritization | Facilitate smoother backlog grooming and prioritize the right work using List, Kanban, and Hierarchy views. |
| Portfolio roadmaps | Visualize the prioritized work into roadmaps and set milestones to track key outcomes. |
| Free-form roadmaps | Flexibly plan and track work across the company, without restricting to a planning organization or portfolio. |
| Scenario planning | Optimize your portfolio planning by comparing potential outcomes, assessing their alignment with strategic goals, and approving the best scenario as your live plan. |
| Scoring | Start scoring items in your portfolio plan to prioritize work based on a pre-defined or a custom score. |
| Goal management | Create goals for portfolio plans, set targets for them, and evaluate the progress of the goals and targets to accomplish your organizational plans and drive business outcomes. |
| Diagnostics | Identify and fix errors in the configuration and other common settings. |
| Capacity Planning | Generate, view, and better plan the resource capacity for your prioritized planning items. |
| Financial planning | View the financial planning of your planning items using the comprehensive view in the new Financials screen. |
Comparing Portfolio Planning Workspace with Strategic Planning Workspace
- Portfolio Planning Workspace: Prioritize, roadmap, and track work when using waterfall methodology. Enhance traditional portfolio planning for demand and project management. To learn more about Portfolio Planning, see Portfolio Planning.
- Strategic Planning Workspace: Prioritize, roadmap, and track work when using traditional, agile, or hybrid methodologies. Align strategy to execution by defining and tracking goals across the organization.
| Feature | Portfolio Planning Workspace | Strategic Planning Workspace |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-defined lens: Project Portfolio |
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Pre-defined lens: Organization|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Pre-defined lens: Project Program|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Pre-defined lens: Product|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Pre-defined lens: Strategic Investments|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Pre-defined lens: Goals|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Pre-defined lens: Value Stream|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Pre-defined lens: Business Capability|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Lens configuration: Modify existing lens|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Lens configuration: Create new lens|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Portfolio plans: Create and share|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Planning items: Supported planning items|Project, Demand|Project, Demand, Epic, Custom| |Supported items for high-level planning|Program (pm_program)|Strategic Program, Initiative, Custom| |Planning items: Custom planning item tables|
No|Five predefined tables|
|Prioritization|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Hierarchy (Prioritization)|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Kanban (Prioritization)|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Roadmaps: Timeline|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Roadmaps: Kanban|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Scenario planning|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Scoring|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Goals|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Product Feedback|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Capacity planning|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Financials|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Create and share free-form roadmaps|Project, Demand, and Program tables|Any ServiceNow® platform entity| |Enterprise Agile Planning|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Dashboards|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Monitor goals and strategies in ServiceNow AI Control Tower|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Strategy and Goals - Managing enterprise goals using boards|
No|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
|Next Experience for Demand Management|
Yes|\[Omitted image "icon-check-mark-green.png"\] Alt text: Yes|
- Lenses in Strategic Planning
Lenses represent planning perspectives, which would be different for planning managers at different levels in an organization. Lenses enable you to create personalized portfolio plans through which you prioritize and align work with high-level initiatives and goals. - Portfolio plans in Strategic Planning
Personalized portfolio plans help you align work with your company's objectives and roadmap the right work for the right time. Drive shared strategy using planning insights from portfolio plans and improve enterprise planning. - Scoring in Strategic Planning
Scoring enables you to prioritize items, such as epics, projects, demands, initiatives, strategic programs, and other planning items, based on a defined quantitative metric. - Goals in Strategic Planning
Create goals for your portfolio plan, set targets for them, and evaluate the progress of these goals and targets to accomplish your organizational plans and drive business outcomes. - Prioritization in Strategic Planning
Prioritize work that is relevant for your portfolio using a centralized workspace in Strategic Planning. Review and determine the right work to invest in. - Roadmaps in Strategic Planning
Strategically plan work for your company using visual roadmaps in Strategic Planning Workspace. - Scenario planning in Strategic Planning
Create and evaluate strategic scenarios to explore different planning approaches. Approve the optimal scenario that aligns with the organizational goals and strategic priorities. - Capacity in Strategic Planning
The Capacity tab provides portfolio managers a comprehensive view of capacity, allocations, and utilization of resources. - Financial planning for planning items
Plan, re-forecast, track the financials, and create baselines for all of your planning items. - Strategic Planning with PPM, Agile 2.0, and SAFe
Facilitate execution of the work planned in Strategic Planning in ServiceNow applications such as Project Portfolio Management (PPM), Agile Development 2.0, or Scaled Agile Framework. - Better together with other ServiceNow applications
The integration of Strategic Planning with other ServiceNow applications helps portfolio and product managers to optimize planning, collaboration, and release management for their products.
Parent Topic:Portfolio Planning in Strategic Planning Workspace