Prioritizing portfolio plan work in Strategic Planning Workspace

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Prioritizing portfolio plan work in Strategic Planning Workspace

    The Strategic Planning Workspace in ServiceNow enables you to efficiently review, add, update, and rank planning items within your portfolio plan’s work pipeline. This prioritization capability helps ensure you focus on the right work at the right time, streamlining your portfolio management process.

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    Prioritization is available exclusively for portfolio plans and displays planning items from the Planning Item table and its child tables. To include projects or epics managed outside these tables (such as those from PPM Standard or Agile Development 2.0), integrations must be configured to map external records into Strategic Planning Workspace.

    Key Features

    • Multiple views: Access your backlog using List, Kanban, and Hierarchy views for flexible visualization and management of planning items.
    • Add and update planning items: Create new backlog items and edit details, attach files, and collaborate with stakeholders directly within the Prioritization page to facilitate real-time backlog grooming.
    • MoSCoW prioritization: Categorize items as Must have, Could have, Should have, or Won't have to establish a baseline priority framework.
    • Rank planning items: Use drag-and-drop functionality to reorder items and set their priority sequence.
    • Prioritize to roadmap: Mark items as Prioritized to include them in the portfolio’s roadmap.
    • Direct access to execution apps: Open planning items in relevant execution applications such as ServiceNow PPM, Agile Development 2.0, or SAFe for seamless transition from planning to execution.
    • Personalization and filtering: Customize views, including column arrangement, grouping, and sorting, with preferences applied across shared users or groups. Apply filters consistently across Prioritization, Roadmap, and Scoring views to focus on relevant data sets.

    Practical Considerations

    Because the Prioritization feature defaults to displaying items only from specific Planning Item tables, integrating with external project and epic management tools is necessary to unify all planning items in one workspace. This integration ensures comprehensive visibility and control over your portfolio’s backlog.

    Review the work pipeline for your portfolio in Strategic Planning Workspace. Add, update, and rank planning items so that you can prioritize the right work for the right time.

    Prioritization views

    Prioritization page in Strategic Planning represents your backlog, showing the items of your work pipeline in List, Kanban, and Hierarchy views. For an overview of these views, see Prioritization in Strategic Planning.

    Note:
    The Prioritization feature is available only for portfolio plans.

    Planning items in the Prioritization tab

    By default, portfolio plans show only the records that are created within the Planning Item [sn_align_core_planning_item] table and its child tables. Any records stored in other ServiceNow AI Platform tables aren't shown unless an integration is established.

    Consider that you want to manage projects through a portfolio plan. Project records that are only stored in the Planning Item Project [sn_align_project] table are displayed in the Prioritization tab. But any projects created using the PPM Standard aren't shown by default because these project records are stored in the PPM Project [pm_project] table. To enable their display in Strategic Planning Workspace, set up integration with PPM so that the tables of Strategic Planning are mapped to the tables of PPM.

    The same is the case with Epics created using Agile Development 2.0 and SAFe applications. See Configuring Strategic Planning with PPM, Agile 2.0, and SAFe.

    Prioritization features

    On the Prioritization page, you can perform the following actions:
    Feature Description Example UI
    Add new planning items

    Add new items to your backlog directly from the Prioritization page.

    The type of planning items that you can create here depends on your portfolio plan configuration.

    Sample drop-down list actions showing options to select New epic and New project as a new planning item on the Prioritization page.
    Update planning item details

    Edit details of the planning items, add attachments, and collaborate on them with the stakeholders directly from the Prioritization page to facilitate smoother real-time backlog grooming.

    MoSCoW values

    Categorize planning items using the Must have, Could have, Should have, or Won't have (MoSCoW) values in the List and Hierarchy views. This categorization creates a baseline of priority that you can later use when you're grooming and prioritizing work for your portfolio.

    MoSCoW options for planning items in Strategic Planning Prioritization tab.

    Rank planning items

    		 Decide on the order of priority for the planning items by using the drag functionality to rearrange them.
    Prioritize items to roadmap Set the planning state of an item to Prioritized to add them to the portfolio's roadmap.
    Open the planning item in the Execution app

    If you're using ServiceNow PPM, Agile Development 2.0, or SAFe applications to execute the planned work, you can open the planning items in their own application.

    For example, if your planning item is an epic, you can navigate to the epic form directly from the Prioritization page.

    Open planning item in execution app from Prioritization page.
    Personalize the Prioritization page views

    Change the way that the Prioritization page is displayed so that you can view the information in the format that you need.

    All settings, such as row and column personalization, grouping, and sorting, are saved as the portfolio plan preferences. So, these settings are applied to all the users or user groups that the portfolio plan is shared with.
    Apply filters for Prioritization Apply filters to all the views of Prioritization, Roadmap, or Scoring so that you can view a consistent data set for your portfolio plan. Apply filters for Prioritization.
    Reorder the columns by dragging them horizontally Reorder the position of the columns on the List and Hierarchy view by dragging them horizontally. Reorder columns in prioritization by dragging.