Portfolio plans in Strategic Planning

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Portfolio plans in Strategic Planning

    Portfolio plans in Strategic Planning enable planning managers to align work with company objectives by creating personalized, goal-driven plans using various lenses (perspectives). These plans help define goals, set targets, and roadmap work to ensure strategic alignment across departments and business units. By visualizing plans and progress, planning managers can share insights with stakeholders and drive enterprise-wide planning improvements.

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    Key Features

    • Customizable Plans: Create multiple portfolio plans using different lenses such as Strategic Investment or Organization lenses, enabling views from initiative-level to department perspectives.
    • High-Level Planning: Roadmap strategic items like Initiatives, Strategic Programs, Programs, and Product Enhancements that span multiple business units, facilitating breakdown and prioritization of company priorities.
    • Goal Alignment: Define and manage goals associated with strategic items, ensuring that planned work aligns with long-term company objectives.
    • Hierarchy View: Drill down from high-level strategic items to lower-level planning items (e.g., epics, projects, demands) to manage and review the work pipeline comprehensively.
    • Lens Configuration: Utilize predefined lenses for planning or work with administrators to configure custom lenses or enable high-level planning for additional item types.

    Key Outcomes

    • Improved Strategic Alignment: Prioritize the right work by linking it directly to company goals and strategic initiatives.
    • Efficient Planning: Reduce time spent aligning execution teams by providing clear, shared planning insights.
    • Enterprise-wide Visibility: Share portfolio plans and progress with stakeholders for better collaboration and transparency.
    • Enhanced Decision-Making: Leverage portfolio plans to support high-level decision-making and roadmap planning across departments and portfolios.

    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.

    Portfolio plans overview

    Portfolio plans are custom plans per planning manager that are built using a lens. They enable planning managers to define goals, set targets for these goals, and then roadmap the work to ensure alignment between goals and the planned work.

    A strategy leader using the Strategic Investment lens plans in the perspective of initiatives, and a department head using the Organization lens plans in the perspective of a department.

    As a planning manager, you can create multiple portfolio plans using different lenses. Visualize the plans and progress of work from different perspectives and share them with stakeholders.

    Using portfolio plans, you can:
    • Enable focused planning of work in the desired perspective (lens).
    • Prioritize the right work and improve alignment with business strategy.
    • Reduce the time spent on aligning execution teams to the right work.

    High-level planning using portfolio plans

    In Strategic Planning, you can roadmap work for your organization at a high level by building portfolio plans for strategic items such as initiatives. High-level planning items usually span across multiple business units, departments, or portfolios of a company. These strategic work items help you further breakdown a company's priorities.
    • Initiative: Used to achieve long-term goals. Initiatives are designed to create a sustainable competitive advantage for the organization. They often involve large-scale effort that requires coordination and collaboration across multiple departments or business units.
    • Strategic Program: Used to achieve specific milestones and outcomes of an Initiative.
    • Program (pm_program): Used to achieve milestones and outcomes of a program.
    • Product Enhancement: Used to plan and achieve feature enhancements for digital products.

    Using the Hierarchy view, review the work pipeline and drill down to the low level planning items that are associated to your strategic item.

    For example, as an EPMO, you can view the epics associated to each initiative. Also, you can view and manage the goals that these initiatives are aligned to.

    By default, you can use Initiatives or Strategic Programs from the Strategic Investments lens or Programs (pm_program) from the Project Program lens to create high-level portfolio plans. See Create a high-level portfolio plan.

    If you need high-level planning enabled for items other than Initiatives, Strategic Programs, Programs (pm_program), work with your ServiceNow admin to complete the additional configuration. See High-level planning configuration in Strategic Planning.

    Here's a sample portfolio plan that shows a few strategic programs of the company and the low-level work (projects and demands) that are aligned with them.High-level portfolio plan hierarchy view.

    Work with your administrator to ensure the required lens setup. See Lens configuration in Strategic Planning.

    Start creating portfolio plans to align work with strategy. See Managing portfolio plans in Strategic Planning Workspace.