Roadmaps in Portfolio Planning
Summarize
Summary of Roadmaps in Portfolio Planning
Roadmaps in Portfolio Planning Workspace enable ServiceNow customers to visually plan, prioritize, and track work across their organization. These flexible roadmaps align work with business objectives and facilitate collaboration among stakeholders such as enterprise project managers, portfolio managers, and project managers. Roadmaps provide high-level visibility into work progress and dependencies, helping delivery teams and decision-makers stay aligned during development.
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Key Features
- Portfolio Plan Roadmaps: Use lenses to create flexible portfolio plans that prioritize and track work from different organizational perspectives, connecting them to overarching company plans.
- Free-form Roadmaps: Customize roadmaps by filtering work items across multiple portfolios or departments, offering tailored views for specific teams or functions.
- Hybrid Roadmaps: Combine multiple types of planning items (e.g., projects and demands) into a single view to provide a comprehensive picture.
- Milestones: Create and manage milestones at both the roadmap and planning item levels to track key events, deadlines, and strategic outcomes. Project milestones are read-only within roadmaps and should be updated in Project Workspace.
- Planning Item Dependencies: Visualize and manage dependencies between various planning items, including cross-portfolio and unplanned items, to identify critical sequences and improve scheduling accuracy.
- Tracking Mode: Monitor status, progress, and metrics for each planning item using status indicators and percentage completion, enabling informed decisions and clear communication with stakeholders.
Key Outcomes
- Improved flexibility to adapt plans as organizational priorities evolve.
- Enhanced collaboration and alignment across teams and stakeholders through shared visual plans.
- Greater visibility into work progress, dependencies, and milestones to support strategic decision-making.
- Ability to tailor planning views to different organizational units and combine various work types in a single roadmap.
- Streamlined tracking and communication of project status and outcomes to ensure transparency and accountability.
Effectively plan work for your company using visual roadmaps in Portfolio Planning Workspace.
As your organization grows and priorities change, it’s important to have the flexibility of changing existing plans and making new plans with ease. Using roadmaps, you can create a layout of current and upcoming plans while aligning them with your business objectives. Share these visual plans with other stakeholders across the organization, drive meaningful conversations, and validate common understandings.
Each roadmap is a high-level block of work, prioritized by different planning personas such as enterprise project managers, portfolio managers, project managers, or others. Roadmaps also provide insights to the stakeholders while guiding the delivery teams during development.
- Portfolio plan roadmaps
- Free-form roadmaps
- Hybrid roadmaps
- Roadmap-level milestones
- Planning item-level milestones
- Planning item dependencies
- Tracking mode
Portfolio plan roadmaps
By creating a flexible portfolio plan using lenses, you can prioritize and roadmap work for your portfolio. Use these portfolio roadmaps to plan and track work in different perspectives of the organization separately, while connecting them to the high-level plans of the company.
Create a portfolio plan to get started.
Free-form roadmaps
Free-form roadmaps provide you the flexibility of planning and tracking work from different units of your company, such as work across multiple portfolios.
Using a filter condition, you can define what kind of work items you want on your roadmap. If you want to have a roadmap dedicated to just the projects of your department, define a roadmap for projects to start tracking the progress of current projects and create plans for new ones. See Create free-form roadmap in Portfolio Planning Workspace.
Free-form roadmaps provide you the flexibility of planning and tracking work from different units of your company, such as work across multiple portfolios.
Using a filter condition, you can define what kind of work items you want on your roadmap. If you want to have a roadmap dedicated to just the projects of your department, define a roadmap for projects to start tracking the progress of current projects and create plans for new ones.
See Create free-form roadmap in Portfolio Planning Workspace.
Hybrid roadmaps
In Portfolio Planning, with both the portfolio roadmaps and free-form roadmaps, you can build hybrid roadmaps. For example, you can have a combination of projects and demands in a single view.
Milestones on the roadmap
You can create milestones for your roadmap, or for each planning item on the roadmap.
- Roadmap-level or portfolio-level milestones
The milestones created at the roadmap level can help with tracking launch dates or key events during that roadmap's timeline. To learn how to create roadmap milestones, see Add milestones for roadmap in Portfolio Planning Workspace.
- Planning item milestones
Using the milestones created at the item level, you can focus better on strategic outcomes. These milestones help with tracking deadlines or other important dates. You can access milestones on projects and demands.
You can create and update milestones for all types of planning items from the roadmap, but the project milestones are read-only. As any changes to project milestones may impact the associated project plans, it is recommended to create or update project milestones using Project Workspace in Project Portfolio Management (PPM).
To learn how to create item-level milestones on a roadmap, see Add milestones for roadmap items in Portfolio Planning Workspace.
Planning item dependencies
While planning, it is essential to know how your planning items are connected with each other. Unless you know the dependency for each item, you might miss prioritizing time-critical projects or demands. This lack of information may also put you at risk of not scheduling the right work for the right time period.
Dependencies on the roadmap help you visualize these relationships between the planning items, so that you can adjust their scheduling accordingly.
In Portfolio Planning, you can create simple or hybrid dependencies. For example, you can establish dependencies between two projects or between a project and an epic. Also, planning items can have dependency on items within the same portfolio plan or on items that aren't planned yet.
The dependency lines help you easily identify the items that may have to be prioritized together. Such easy identification of relationships between planning items provides better collaboration and facilitates enhanced decision making in the planning process.
To learn about creating and managing dependencies, see Add dependencies for roadmap items in Portfolio Planning Workspace.
Tracking mode in roadmaps
Track status, progress, and metrics for each item on the roadmap. Using the status indicators and the percentage complete score on the planning item bars, make informed decisions ahead of time and easily communicate your work progress to the stakeholders.
See Track roadmap item progress in Portfolio Planning Workspace.