Optimizing planning with scenario planning in Strategic Planning Workspace

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Optimizing planning with scenario planning in Strategic Planning Workspace

    Scenario planning within the Strategic Planning Workspace helps portfolio managers optimize portfolio planning by simulating multiple planning outcomes. It enables comparison of these scenarios against strategic goals, budget constraints, and resource allocations to select and approve the best plan as the live portfolio plan. This approach supports ongoing portfolio adjustments during regular planning cycles or mid-cycle reviews.

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    Key Features

    • Prioritization tab: Add or remove planning items and adjust their dates to align with strategic priorities.
    • Roadmap tab: Visualize planning items on a Gantt chart-style timeline, with drag-and-drop date adjustments.
    • Financials tab: Set custom budget targets and simulate different budget scenarios to compare outcomes, focusing on balancing resources and strategic objectives.
    • Budget allocation: Enable portfolio-level budget allocation and configure attributes by expense or cost type, facilitating detailed financial control.
    • Outcomes panel: Presents financial summaries including Capex and Opex targets, utilized and remaining budgets, and benefits from planned items, with clear visual indicators for budget compliance.
    • Scenario management: Create, compare, approve, rename, and delete scenarios, supporting thorough evaluation and decision-making.
    • Personalization: Filter financial views by time scale and range, managing budgets on monthly, quarterly, or yearly cadences to match organizational cycles.

    Practical Use Cases

    • Fiscal year planning: Portfolio managers can create scenarios to prioritize items aligned to strategic goals, collaborate with stakeholders, compare multiple scenarios, and approve an optimal portfolio plan for the upcoming fiscal year.
    • Mid-cycle reprioritization: When priorities change mid-year, managers can create scenarios to incorporate updates, gather feedback from program and financial teams, and finalize an adjusted portfolio plan.

    Important Considerations

    • Financial scenario planning supports Epics, Projects, and Demands planning items only.
    • Customers using Legacy Investment Funding should migrate to the new experience for financial scenario planning.
    • Once a scenario is approved, it becomes the active portfolio plan for the specified planning cycle.

    By leveraging scenario planning in Strategic Planning Workspace, ServiceNow customers can make informed, financially grounded decisions that align portfolio initiatives with organizational strategy and budget constraints, enhancing planning effectiveness and stakeholder collaboration.

    As a portfolio manager, optimize your portfolio planning by comparing potential outcomes, assessing their alignment with strategic goals, and approving the best scenario as your live plan.

    Scenario planning items in the Prioritization tab

    The Prioritization tab of the Scenario page enables you to add and remove planning items to/from a scenario and adjust their dates.

    Prioritization tab of the Scenario screen.

    Scenario planning items in the Roadmap tab

    The Roadmap tab displays a Gantt chart-like view of the planning items in the scenario, showing their planned start and end dates across the portfolio plan timeline. Using the Roadmap tab, you can drag the bars representing planning items across the timeline to adjust their dates.

    Roadmap tab of the Scenario screen

    Scenario planning items in Financials tab

    The Financials tab of the Scenario page enables you to set custom targets, budget, and compare the allocated budget against target using the outcomes panel.

    Financials tab in Scenario planning view detailing the budget and forecast values of planning items.

    The portfolio manager can simulate multiple scenarios with different budget combinations and compare their outcomes to arrive at an informed decision to balance the resources and strategic objectives. Using the financials view in Scenario planning, you can get a simulation mode for the financial information. Using this view, Portfolio managers working on the portfolios can set a portfolio budget target for a particular planning cycle, which could be a monthly, quarterly, yearly, or beyond a year up to five years. Using this defined budget, the portfolio users can prioritize the planning items within the portfolio to analyze if the prioritized items can be executed within their portfolio budget, while reviewing the monetary benefit from the prioritized items.
    Important:
    Enable the budget allocation property to allocate budget to your planning items at portfolio-level and configure the budget attributes to allocate budget by expense type or cost type.

    Create multiple scenarios to compare them, and work with your stakeholders to approve an ideal plan with better monetary benefit returns. Once approved, the approved Scenario becomes your new portfolio plan for the defined planning cycle. For more information to know about the changes happening in a portfolio after scenario approval, see Approve a scenario in Strategic Planning.

    You can perform financial scenario planning throughout your planning or execution cycle depending on your organization needs such as at your regular planning cycles, quarterly reviews, or financial review cycles. Financials in scenario planning helps you to arrive at an informed decision and customize the portfolio planning to match with your organization needs.
    Note:
    • Financials in scenario planning is supported only for Epics, Projects, and Demands type of planning items.
    • Customers using the Legacy Investment Funding should migrate to new experience to work on the financial scenario planning.

    Personalize your scenario planning financials view using the Time scale and Range filters. Manage the budget of your planning items by monthly, quarterly, or yearly cadence depending on the planning cycle of your organization.

    Outcomes panel in Scenario planning

    The outcomes panel in the simulation indicates the financial information of the portfolio such as target and budget amounts for Capex and Opex, set budget target for this simulation, utilized and remaining budget from the target, benefit from the In-plan items, and the actual costs accounting from the out of plan items. The aggregated data is fetched based on the portfolio timeline range including the target and budget data.

    Representations in the outcomes panel for the identification.
    Table 1. Outcomes panel representation
    Indication Definition
    Red text for amount without progress bar indication for Total Simulated Budget No defined or set target amount for this scenario.
    Red text for amount and red progress bar for Total Simulated Budget Total allocated budget for planning items exceeds the scenario's set target amount.
    Red text amount for Capex Budget Capex Budget allocations exceed the scenario's Capex target.
    Red text amount for Opex Budget Opex Budget allocations exceed the scenario's Opex target.
    Green text for budget amounts and green progress bar Budget allocation for each expense types and total budget is within the scenario's set target.

    Scenario planning features

    In scenario planning, you can perform the following actions:
    Feature Description
    Create a scenario in Strategic Planning Create a scenario from the current plan, or another scenario, in a simulated environment to compare the scenario with the live plan and other scenarios.
    Compare scenarios in Strategic Planning Compare scenarios and the live plan side by side to review tradeoffs and items added or removed from the plans.
    Approve a scenario in Strategic Planning Approve the best scenario.
    Manage scenarios in Strategic Planning View list of scenarios, rename scenarios, and delete scenarios.

    Scenario planning use cases

    The following are high-level use cases for scenario planning.
    • Fiscal year planning: Megan Burke, Portfolio Manager at ACME Inc, is planning for the next fiscal year and is required to prioritize planning items and align them with the organizational strategic goals. Megan creates a scenario for the portfolio plan and then uses the Prioritization tab to align items with goals. Megan holds discussions with program managers and with the financial team, creates multiple scenarios, and compares them. Megan approves the optimal scenario as a well-aligned strategic portfolio plan for the next fiscal year.
    • Mid-cycle reprioritization; Changed priorities emerging mid-year require adjustments to the current portfolio plan. John Doe, the product manager at ACME Inc, creates a scenario and incorporates the changed priorities. John adjusts the plan based on the program manager's and financial team's feedback and finalizes the plan.