Strategic Portfolio Management

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 10 minutes to read
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    Summary of Strategic Portfolio Management

    ServiceNow® Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) helps align work with business strategy, facilitating the planning, delivery, and tracking of products and services. It supports digital transformation, enabling organizations to optimize outcomes and respond swiftly to changes while enhancing the delivery of customer value.

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    Key Features

    • Collaboration Tools: Centralized hub for teams to manage work and documentation through Collaborative Work Management (CWM) using Spaces, Boards, and Docs.
    • Agile Framework: Flexibly scale Agile practices with Enterprise Agile Planning, allowing configuration of workflows and visualizations of team progress.
    • Planning Lenses: Use Business Capability and Project Program lenses to prioritize and roadmap work in alignment with strategic goals.
    • Target Association: Associate work items with specific targets to track contributions and manage resources effectively.
    • Enhanced Scoring and Prioritization: Utilize improved interfaces to manage portfolio plans, apply filters, and export data for collaboration.
    • AI Integration: Leverage Now Assist for SPM to enhance feedback management and demand creation through AI-driven tools.
    • Resource Management: Easily reassign or unassign resources and track assignment statuses with improved visualization.

    Key Outcomes

    By utilizing SPM, organizations can enhance team collaboration, streamline work processes, and make informed decisions based on real-time data. This leads to improved resource allocation, better alignment of projects with strategic goals, and overall increased efficiency in delivering business value. Customers can expect to achieve greater agility in their operations and the ability to adapt to changing business priorities seamlessly.

    Align work with strategy to deliver products and services in a way that supports your business goals and priorities. ServiceNow® Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM, formerly IT Business Management, enables you to use digital transformation to drive more customer value faster. Plan, deliver, and track value across different methodologies.

    SPM helps you align work to strategy, enabling you to optimize business outcomes and respond rapidly to change so that you deliver more value, not just more output.

    With Strategic Portfolio Management, gather critical business requirements, prioritize new requests, assess top-level investments, allocate resources, and adapt to changing business priorities by making adjustments on an ongoing basis. Manage strategic and operational work from one place while driving Agile transformation.

    Collaborative Work Management

    Improve team efficiency with greater collaboration and enhanced task management

    Collaborative Work Management provides a central hub for teams to plan, visualize, manage, and collaborate on work.

    Enterprise Agile Planning

    Flexibly scale your Agile framework using Enterprise Agile Planning

    Streamline communication and drive coordination between diverse teams using a flexible and scalable Agile configuration in an intuitive workspace.

    Business Capability lens

    Enable focused planning using the Business Capability or Project Program lens

    Use the Business Capability lens for building a personalized portfolio of work to plan, prioritize, and roadmap the work based on your business capabilities or business applications by aligning with the strategy. Use the Project Program lens to plan, prioritize, and roadmap the work in your programs.
    Associate a target.

    Associate a target with work items to track the work and meet the target

    Associate a target (as primary or non-primary) with work items to track the current or future work where the items contribute to meeting the target.
    Associate multiple planning items to a goal or target.

    Associate multiple planning items to a goal or target at a time

    Use the enhanced Align work window to associate multiple planning items a goal or target at a time from the enhanced Align work window, item’s side panel.
    Add tags to your planning items.

    Add tags to your planning items to categorize them

    Add tags to your planning items from the Prioritization or Scoring page to categorize them based on your requirement.
    Quick filters for Scoring in Strategic Planning Workspace.

    View required data set in Scoring by applying filters

    View the required data set in Scoring by applying filters such as planning state, type, priority, and status.

    Enhanced interface in Scoring and Prioritization. Manage your portfolio plans on the enhanced interface in Scoring and Prioritization

    Take advantage of the enhanced Scoring and Prioritization views to identify the planning items quickly based on their scoring attributes or MoSCoW values.

    Export the planning items data and financial information Export the data of your portfolio plan items and financial information to a Microsoft Excel or CSV file

    Export the data of your portfolio plan items and financial information to a Microsoft Excel or CSV file to share the data and collaborate with your business stakeholders.

    Product Feedback in Strategic Planning.

    Organize and prioritize your feedback efficiently using feedback filters

    Create and sort feedback to reduce the need to apply filters each time to view specific feedback using feedback filters.

    Goal target. Manage your goals from the enhanced goals view

    Identify the unit of measure symbol for your targets on the enhanced List view of Goals.

    Resource Management Workspace Reassign or unassign resource assignments

    Reassign and unassign resource assignments, edit resource assignments, and export resource cards as CSV or XML file.

    project workspace. Collaborate on project documentation using Docs

    Manage multiple types of docs and collaborate on documents related to projects.

    Now Assist for SPM. Enable AI experience in feedback and demands using Now Assist for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)

    Use the Now Assist for SPM application to ensure that business demands and feedback are communicated clearly, efficiently, and effectively.

    Improve team efficiency with greater collaboration and enhanced task management


    Create automated processes using predefined templates in Collaborative Work Management.
    Collaborative Work Management (CWM) enables cross-functional teams work together using a single and flexible workspace using Spaces, Boards, and Docs. CWM also facilitates unifying all work in the ServiceNow AI Platform by connecting tasks and Docs with related entities such as Cases, Incidents, and Goals.
    • Spaces: Organize and manage the team's work. Within a Space, you can create unlimited Boards to manage tasks and Docs to manage documentation for those tasks.
    • Boards: Configure a flexible workspace without the involvement of an admin user. Define your own workflow and organize work the way you want using custom fields, custom work types, and flexible views (List, Gantt, and Kanban).
    • Board automations: Boost efficiency and save time by automating processes such as sending notifications, reassigning tasks, or updating task priority when certain conditions are met.
    • Docs: Create rich-text docs and manage different types of documentation such as meeting notes, technical specifications, or feature requirements from a single location and avoid using multiple disconnected tools.
    • Connect to Planning: Align work to higher level planning by incorporating Boards into roadmaps and prioritization in Strategic Planning and Portfolio Planning workspaces.

    Enable AI experience using Now Assist skills

    AI-generated summary of a feedback record.

    Feedback summarization: Access and prioritize feedback by generating concise summary of lengthy feedback or enhancement request and reduce the need of manual feedback analysis. Improve the product features, usability, performance and get insights on your feedback using feedback summarization skill.

    Basic prompt to create a demand using Virtual Agent chat in the Employee Center.

    Conversational experience for demand creation: Create and edit demand requests using Virtual Agent's conversational interface, driven by generative AI, resulting in cost savings. Increase adoption of your demand intake process by making it so easy to use.

    Collaborate on project documentation using Docs

    Docs page in project workspace.

    Create and manage multiple documents related to your project. The project docs provide a collaborative space for project managers to store information and create templates for project charters, briefs, and meeting notes.

    Enable focused planning using the Business Capability or Project Program lens

    Business capability lens.

    Lenses in Strategic Planning Workspace indicate a perspective by which you can plan your work.
    • Use the Business Capability lens to plan, prioritize, and roadmap the work in the Strategic Planning Workspace based on your business capabilities or business applications by aligning with the strategy. You can create a portfolio plan using the Business Capability lens only when ServiceNow® Enterprise Architecture Workspace is installed.
    • Use the Project Program lens to plan, prioritize, and roadmap the work in your programs.

    Associate a target with work items to track the work and meet the target

    Associate a target with work items.

    Associate a target (as primary or non-primary) with work items to track the current or future work where the items contribute to meeting the target. When you create a primary goal or target relationship with an item that already has a primary relationship, the existing association becomes a non-primary and a new primary relationship is created.

    Associate multiple planning items to a goal or target at a time

    Associate multiple planning items to a goal or target.

    • Associate multiple planning items to a goal or target at a time from the enhanced Align work window, item’s side panel, or item’s full details page.
    • Remove the existing association with the goal or target from the side panel or the full details page of the goal or target.
    • Use the View aligned work option from the row context menu (Row context menu icon.) to view and manage the planning items in association with the goal or target.
    • Search the aligned work items of the goal or target from the item’s side panel by the name, owner, or type of the item. Also, the Aligned work tab on the item’s side panel shows the count of work items aligned with the goal or target.

    Add tags to your planning items to categorize them

    Add tags to planning items.

    • Add tags to your planning items from the Prioritization or Scoring page to categorize them based on your requirement. Any tagging updates (addition or removal) made to a record are automatically synced across all views in the Planning page and in the Scoring page.
    • Filter the planning items by the assigned tags.

    View required data set in Scoring by applying filters

    Filters in scoring.

    Apply filters to view the required data set in Scoring. You can apply these filters with different choice options such as planning state, type, priority, and status. These filters are saved as your preferences. So, you can view the same data set and continue your planning when you log back in.

    Manage your portfolio plans on the enhanced interface in Scoring and Prioritization

    Scoring attributes in scoring.

    The colored pills added to the Confidence and Effort attributes of the RICE framework help you identify the planning items quickly based on high or low confidence and high or low effort.

    The colored pills added to the Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have (MoSCoW) values help you quickly identify and sort the planning items based on their MoSCoW values. Also, the updated 1 - Must have, 2 - Should have, 3 - Could have, 4 - Won’t have (MoSCoW) values helps you sort the planning items based on the importance.

    Export the data of your portfolio plan items and financial information to a Microsoft Excel or CSV file

    Export the planning items data from List view of the Prioritization tab.

    Export the data of your portfolio plan items from the Scoring page and List view of the Prioritization tab, and financial information to a Microsoft Excel or CSV file to share the data and collaborate with your business stakeholders.

    Manage your goals from the enhanced goals view

    Goal management in Strategic Planning.

    • Identify the unit of measure symbol for your targets on the enhanced List view of Goals. The values for the Base value, Target value, and Actual value fields appear on the List tab of Goals along with their unit of measure symbol.
    • View the number of work items associated with a goal or target on the enhanced List view of Goals and track how current and future work contributes to meeting the goal or target.

    Manage financials for your epics, demands, and projects

    Financials view of a planning item showing the cost plans, actual and planned costs, EAC, ETC, and the total for actual expenses.

    Create configurable widgets to identify the financial performance of your planning items. Export Costs and Baseline comparison view to a Microsoft Excel or CSV file to share the data and collaborate with your business stakeholders.

    Scale and enhance your Agile framework using Enterprise Agile Planning


    ART Backlog in Enterprise Agile Planning.
    Personas such as scrum leaders, product owners, portfolio managers, solution train engineers, and Agile release train engineers can enhance their Agile framework using the following EAP features:
    • Configuration: Use the four pre-defined configurations or flexibly configure agile structure, work item hierarchies, and planning calendars.
    • Backlog: Create, update, and prioritize work items. In addition, schedule work items into iterations such as Planning Intervals (PI) or Sprints.
    • PI Planning: Plan work for multiple teams across iterations (for example, Big Room Planning). Create and visualize dependencies between work items, and reschedule work to react quickly to changes while ensuring alignment with business priorities.
    • Dashboards: Visualize the progress of teams at all levels using team-specific dashboards. Evaluate how your teams are progressing with work, the value that they are delivering in alignment with goals, and gauge the performance of the child teams.
    EAP is available when you install the Strategic Planning application from ServiceNow Store using the SPM Pro license.

    Reassign or unassign resource assignments

    Resource Management Workspace board view showing resource allocations and unassigned tasks.

    Reassign or unassign resource assignments depending on the resource availability or resource allocation status. Export a custom created resource card as Microsoft Excel or an XML file to share it with the stakeholders. Identify the group resource assignments and operational resource assignments using the new iconography to track work assigned for the resources.

    Organize and prioritize your feedback efficiently using feedback filters

    Animated tour of the feedback filters in product feedback.

    Create and manage feedback effortlessly with feedback filters and reduce the need to manually apply filters each time to find specific feedback. Project managers can save feedback filters, share them with team members or groups, and collaborate on specific feedback filters.

    Organization Extension (com.snc.organization_extension) plugin

    Organization Extension (com.snc.organization_extension) plugin activates Goals, Business unit, Enterprise strategy, and Business unit strategy entities. It is available on zBoot to all customers with demo data.

    Business Units, Goals, Enterprise Strategy, and Business Unit Strategy modules are available in the Organization application menu.

    Business Applications and Business Capabilities modules are also available within the Organization application menu, however, their related tables are moved to Configuration Management (CMDB) (com.snc.cmdb) plugin, which is available on zBoot but without demo data.

    Learn

    Get started

    • Understand how to deliver business outcomes with speed and agility using ServiceNow SPM. For more information, see Customer Success Center.
    • Learn how to align execution with business goals and priorities. For more information, see Strategic Planning.
    • Create goals, set targets for them, and evaluate the progress of your goals and targets to accomplish the organizational plans and drive business outcomes. For more information, see Goal Framework and Goal Framework for SPM.
    • Enhance your SPM capabilities with specialized plugins that provide read-only roles for various modules, confirming secure access to dashboards and reports.

    Applications and features