Exploring Strategy and Goals in Strategic Planning Workspace
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Strategy and Goals in Strategic Planning Workspace
The Strategic Planning Workspace's Strategy and Goals feature enables ServiceNow customers to create and manage comprehensive boards that consolidate their organization's strategic plans, priorities, goals, and targets into a single, focused interface. This workspace supports tracking progress and aligning strategic vision with measurable outcomes effectively.
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Key Features
- Boards: Customers can create three types of boards—strategy-based (focusing on strategic plans and priorities), goals-based (focusing on goals and targets aligned with priorities), or combined strategy and goals boards. Boards use advanced filter criteria to tailor views precisely to organizational needs.
- Strategy Components: The workspace structures strategic plans, priorities, goals, targets, and associated work items, providing a clear hierarchy from high-level vision down to actionable targets.
- Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) Integration: When installed, Now Assist enhances planning with AI-driven capabilities, including:
- Generating insights to identify at-risk goals and forecast statuses.
- Automatically generating measurable targets to define success criteria.
- Target Actuals Check-in Reminders: Enables scheduling of automated reminders for target owners and contributors to update target actuals on time, improving accountability and data accuracy. Manual reminders can also be sent as needed.
- Flexible Goal Management Compared to Portfolio Plans: Unlike portfolio plans that require defining a lens hierarchy and entity-level goals, Strategy and Goals boards allow goal management directly via filter criteria for simpler and more flexible control. Boards can be created based on assigned entities or filters to consolidate goal tracking.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Organize and align enterprise mission, vision, values, strategic priorities, and goals in one workspace, enhancing visibility and coordination.
- Leverage AI-driven insights and target generation to proactively manage goal progress and success metrics.
- Ensure timely updates of goal progress through configurable reminders, supporting accurate performance tracking.
- Simplify goal creation and monitoring without complex hierarchical configurations, enabling faster adoption and adaptability.
- Integrate existing portfolio plan goals seamlessly by creating corresponding boards, maintaining continuity while enhancing management capabilities.
Use Strategy and Goals in Strategic Planning Workspace to create boards that organize your organization's strategic plans, strategic priorities, goals, and targets in a single, focused view.
Strategy and Goals key components
Understanding the key components of Strategy and Goals in Strategic Planning Workspace helps you structure your organization's strategic vision and track progress toward meaningful outcomes.
The key components for managing enterprise goals in Strategy and Goals are strategic plans, strategic priorities, goals, targets, and any work items associated with goals or targets.
A board is a collection of strategic plans, strategic priorities, goals, and targets based on your selected filter criteria—helping you stay focused and manage them effectively.
For an example of the structure of a strategy from the strategic plan level down to targets, see Enterprise strategy example.
Board types
- A strategy-based board lets you create and manage strategic plans and priorities, aligning high-level direction with the priorities your teams are executing against.
- A goals-based board lets you create goals and targets that align with your strategic priorities, with the ability to tailor the board by entity type and entity to focus on the goals that matter most.
- A combined strategy and goals board includes two pages—Strategy and Goals—supporting both strategic planning and goal execution within a single board.
For any board type, you can define what items appear using advanced filter conditions, giving you precise control over the scope and focus of each view. For details, see Managing boards in Strategic Planning Workspace and Managing strategy and goals using boards.
Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) capabilities for Strategy and Goals
- With the Goals insights skill, you can generate AI-powered insights for goals and review the results to identify at-risk goals, assess forecasted statuses, and act on recommendations before goals fall off track. For details, see Generate insights for a goal.
- With the Target generation skill, you can generate measurable targets for your goals, reducing the effort required to define quantifiable success criteria. For details, see Generate targets for a goal.
Reminders for target actuals check-in
The target check-in reminder feature lets you schedule automatic reminders that notify target owners and contributors to update actuals for their targets based on the defined check-in frequency and before the due date. This ensures that target actuals are updated on time.
To enable the feature, system properties must be configured. For details, see Configure reminders for target actuals.
Goal owners, target owners, and contributors can also send reminders manually when needed. For details, see Send a reminder for target actuals check in.
Comparing portfolio plan goals with enterprise goals (Strategy and Goals)
Creating goals for portfolio plans requires selecting a lens hierarchy and defining goals at the entity level based on the portfolio plan's hierarchy, which can limit flexibility and make it difficult to get started.
In Strategy and Goals, you can create boards and manage goals directly based on board filter criteria, without defining a lens hierarchy, providing a simpler and more flexible approach.
If you are already managing goals in portfolio plans, you can create corresponding boards based on your assigned entities or filter criteria to manage your goals and targets in one location without any additional configuration. For a portfolio plan created using the Goals lens, the goals displayed in the portfolio plan match the goals displayed on a board when both are configured with the same filter criteria.
- Portfolio plan goals: Create goals for your portfolio plans, set targets for them, and evaluate the progress of the goals and targets in Strategic Planning Workspace to accomplish your organizational plans and drive business outcomes. For details, see Managing portfolio plan goals in Strategic Planning Workspace.
- Enterprise goals (Strategy and Goals): Create boards to manage your organization's strategic plans (Mission, Vision, and values), strategic priorities, goals, and targets in a single, focused view. Create boards to manager org splans (missin, vision, values), sps, goals, and targets for your organization level. For details, see Managing boards in Strategic Planning Workspace and Managing strategy and goals using boards.
| Feature | Portfolio plan goals | Enterprise goals (Strategy and Goals) |
|---|---|---|
| Create strategic plans |  |
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| Create strategic priorities | |
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| Create goals | |
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| Add targets | |
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| Associate work with goals or targets | |
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| Send reminders to owners and contributors for target actuals check in | |
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| Generate goal insights with Now Assist for SPM | |
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| Generate targets for goals with Now Assist for SPM | |
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