Roadmaps in Strategic Planning

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Roadmaps in Strategic Planning

    Roadmaps in Strategic Planning Workspace enable organizations to visually plan, prioritize, and track work aligned with business objectives. They provide flexibility to adapt plans as priorities evolve, supporting meaningful collaboration and clear communication across stakeholders. These high-level plans guide delivery teams and offer insights throughout the development lifecycle.

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    Types of Roadmaps

    • Portfolio Plan Roadmaps: Facilitate prioritization and tracking of work across different organizational perspectives using lenses, with views available in Timeline and Kanban formats.
    • Free-form Roadmaps: Allow flexible planning across multiple units or portfolios by filtering work items, also supporting Timeline and Kanban views.
    • Hybrid Roadmaps: Combine various planning items (projects, demands, epics) in a single integrated roadmap for comprehensive visibility.

    Key Features

    • Milestones: Create and track milestones at both the roadmap level (for events like launch dates) and individual planning item level (to monitor deadlines and strategic outcomes). Project milestones are read-only on roadmaps and should be managed in Project Portfolio Management Workspace to avoid conflicts.
    • Dependencies: Visualize and manage dependencies between planning items (simple or hybrid) to identify critical relationships and prioritize work effectively. Dependencies can span items within the same portfolio or across unplanned items, enhancing collaboration and decision-making.
    • Tracking Mode: Monitor status, progress, and metrics of roadmap items using status indicators and percentage completion, enabling informed decisions and clear progress communication.
    • Alignment with Business Goals: Associate planning items with high-level business goals and group items by strategic priorities or primary goals to visualize and ensure alignment directly within the roadmap view.

    Integration and Practical Use

    Strategic Planning integrates with ServiceNow Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) to enable portfolio managers to optimize performance monitoring, prioritize backlogs, and manage business application roadmaps. This integration supports informed budgeting and outcome delivery through enhanced roadmap planning capabilities.

    Additional Notes

    • Roadmaps are included by default in Strategic Planning; separate installation of Roadmap Planning is no longer available.
    • Roadmaps support multiple planning personas such as enterprise project managers, portfolio managers, and project managers.

    Strategically plan work for your company using visual roadmaps in Strategic 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.

    The following are the types of roadmaps that you can work with:
    • Portfolio plan roadmaps
    • Free-form roadmaps
    The features available in these roadmaps are:
    • Hybrid roadmaps
    • Roadmap-level milestones
    • Planning item-level milestones
    • Planning item dependencies
    • Tracking mode
    Note:
    Roadmaps are available with Strategic Planning by default. Roadmap Planning (sn_roadmap_plng) is no longer available to install as a separate application.

    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 in Strategic Planning to get started. You can view and edit your roadmap in both Timeline and Kanban views.

    Figure 1. Roadmap Timeline view
    Portfolio roadmap timeline view.
    Figure 2. Roadmap Kanban view
    Portfolio roadmap kanban view.

    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.

    You can view and edit your free-form roadmap in both Timeline and Kanban views.

    See Create a free-form roadmap in Strategic Planning Workspace.

    Hybrid roadmaps

    In Strategic Planning, with both the portfolio roadmaps and free-form roadmaps, you can build hybrid roadmaps. For example, you can have a combination of projects, demands, and epics 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 a roadmap in Strategic 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 all the planning items such as projects, demands, epics, and others.

    From the roadmap, milestones can be created and updated for all types of planning items, except on projects. Project milestones are read-only on the roadmap because any changes to project milestones may impact the associated project plans. So, 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 Strategic 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 Strategic 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 Strategic 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 the progress of your roadmap items in Strategic Planning Workspace.

    Alignment of your work with business goals

    Each planning item that you create and schedule into a roadmap can associate to high-level business goals. Strategic Planning enables you to visualize how your work is aligned to these business goals directly from the roadmap view.

    On the roadmap, you can group your planning items by the Strategic priority and Primary goal fields so that you can map your work to their goals.

    Better together with other ServiceNow® applications

    Integrate ServiceNow® Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) with Strategic Planning to provide DPM managers the access to roadmap planning. With this integration, you can:
    • Optimize portfolio performance by monitoring services and their performance levels in a comprehensive roadmap.
    • Make informed budgetary decisions and deliver shared outcomes by prioritizing backlogs and managing roadmaps of business applications.
    For more information, see Exploring Digital Portfolio Management.