Strategic Planning release notes
Summarize
Summary of Strategic Planning Release Notes Washington DC
The Washington DC release of the ServiceNow® Strategic Planning application offers enhanced capabilities for comprehensive planning through a unified workspace. It aims to improve Agile planning, facilitate communication, and provide tools for tracking work progress and financial management.
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Key Features
- Agile Planning: Support for multiple agile teams with insights into dependencies and progress through customizable dashboards.
- Financial Management: Customizable widgets for financial details, expense line creation for unplanned costs, and export options to share financial data with stakeholders.
- Enhanced Feedback Management: Real-time inline editing for product feedback with new fields to prioritize and filter feedback efficiently.
- Planning Item Tagging: Ability to categorize planning items using tags, which sync across views for consistent management.
- Goal Management: Improved tracking of work contributions towards goals, including the ability to view and manage associations easily.
- UI Enhancements: Updates across various components for better usability, including new presentation formats and personalization options.
Important Upgrade Information
Upgrading to v4.1.2 requires users to delete user preference records if customizations to the List or Hierarchy views were made, to ensure the new interface is displayed correctly. SPM Pro-licensed features are now exclusively available in the Strategic Planning Workspace.
Key Outcomes
With the Washington DC release, customers can expect improved collaboration and efficiency in project planning, enhanced visibility into financial and resource management, and streamlined feedback processing. These updates are designed to support organizations in aligning their work with strategic goals while providing the tools needed to adapt to changing project requirements.
The ServiceNow® Strategic Planning application helps you accomplish end-to-end planning using a single workspace. Strategic Planning was enhanced and updated in the Washington DC release.
Strategic Planning highlights for the Washington DC release
- Scale your organization's Agile planning with real-time visibility into work progress, streamlined communication, and progress tracking dashboards.
- Customize widgets to view financial information.
- Create expense lines to record and manage unplanned expenses to meet your work requirements that aren’t related to any planned costs.
- Align with the business strategy by using the Business Capability lens and the Project Program lens to plan and prioritize work.
- Export and share the financial information of your planning items in a Microsoft Excel or CSV format with your business stakeholders.
- Export data of your portfolio plan items from the Scoring page and the List view of the Prioritization tab to a Microsoft Excel or CSV file to share the data and collaborate with your business stakeholders.
- Categorize your planning items based on your requirement by adding tags.
- Track how current and future work contribute to meeting a primary or non-primary target by associating the target with work items.
- View operational resource assignments on the Capacity Planning screen.
See Strategic Planning for more information.
Important information for upgrading Strategic Planning to Washington DC
Starting with v4.0.2, you can access the Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) Pro-licensed features only in Strategic Planning Workspace. If you have been using Portfolio Planning Workspace to access SPM Pro-licensed features, such as Goals, Product Feedback, and Hybrid Portfolio Planning, you must now install Strategic Planning to access these features. For more information on the features that can be accessed only in Strategic Planning Workspace, see Exploring Portfolio Planning in Strategic Planning.
If you’re upgrading to Strategic Planning v4.1.2 and previously had customized the List view or the Hierarchy view of the Goals page using the Personalization side panel, the user interface enhancements done in v4.1.2 may not appear. In this case, you must delete your user preference records. For more information on how to delete user preferences made using the Personalization side panel, see KB1642037.
New in the Washington DC release
- Enterprise Agile Planning in Strategic Planning
-
- Support multiple agile teams and their scaling needs within a single instance using flexible work and team hierarchies.
- Plan, visualize, and track work across teams with insights into dependencies using the Planning Board tab for each team.
- Prioritize work items and schedule them into iterations such as Planning Intervals or Sprints using the Backlog tab for each team.
- Upgrade your Agile configuration to align with the evolving needs of your organization.
- Get insights into team progress, velocity trends, and alignment of work to overall organizational goals using configurable dashboards.
- Feedback or Product idea list view enhancements
-
- Use inline editing to allow real-time updates and modify feedback or product idea details.
- Edit multiple rows at once and eliminate the need to modify each record individually.
- Product feedback enhancements
-
- Understand the popularity of feedback using Votes field and prioritize the feedback to make informed decisions. These votes are directly received from the idea portal.
- Identify and prioritize feedback with the Importance field on feedback records and make informed decisions based on the feedback.
- Create feedback filters in Strategic Planning
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- Group and sort feedback with feedback filters.
- As a product manager, create and organize product feedback based on filter criteria, and focus on feedback that is important to you.
- Plan efficiently with additional pre-defined lenses
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- Using the Business Capability lens, enterprise architects can plan, prioritize, and roadmap the work in the Strategic Planning Workspace based on the business capabilities and business applications by aligning with the strategy.
- Using the Project Program lens, program managers and portfolio managers can plan, prioritize, and roadmap work in programs.
- Tagging planning items
-
- Add tags to your planning items to categorize them based on your requirement. Any tagging additions or removals made to a record are automatically synced across all views in the Planning page and the Scoring page.
- Filter the planning items by the assigned tags.
- Use inline editing in the List view of the Prioritization tab when adding and removing the tags to your planning items.
- Planning enhancements
-
- Quickly view and manage the item details from the side panel using the Preview record icon (
) in the List view of the Prioritization tab and the Scoring page.
- The type of planning item is displayed on the item’s details page so that you can identify what the item is, such as a demand or a project.
- When creating a planning item, the Planned start date field and the Planned end date field are populated automatically with the Approved start date value and the Approved end date value respectively.
- Quickly view and manage the item details from the side panel using the Preview record icon (
- Prioritization enhancements
-
- Assign the highest and lowest ranks to the planning items using the Move to top option and the Move to bottom option respectively from the row context menu icon (
).
- Delete planning items using the Delete option from the row context menu icon (
).
- Assign the highest and lowest ranks to the planning items using the Move to top option and the Move to bottom option respectively from the row context menu icon (
- Goal management enhancements
-
- Track how current and future work contribute to meeting a primary or non-primary target by associating the target with work items. 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 at a time to a goal or target from the enhanced Align work model, the item’s side panel, or the item’s full details page. You can also remove the existing association with the goal or target from the side panel or full details page of the goal or target.
- View and manage an association between a planning item and a goal or target using the View aligned work option in the row context menu icon (
). The Aligned work tab introduced in an item’s side panel helps you add or remove an association between work items and a 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 work items.
- The list of goals and targets appear in the expanded mode by default in both the List view and the Hierarchy view so you can view all goals and targets in a hierarchical manner when accessing the page.
- The user preferences are saved automatically to retain the customizations, such as to view or hide columns and the width of the columns, so that you don’t need to set your preferences the next time you access the Goals page.
- When creating a target, the Contributors field on the Target form is automatically populated with the contributors of its goal.
- Run the Create Goals Demo Data with Target Breakdowns scheduled job to create a target breakdowns demo data for the targets.
- For cumulative targets with the breakdown interval set to Quarterly and Yearly, the Target values are populated automatically for each quarterly and yearly breakdown respectively. For example, for a cumulative target created to achieve $10M in the year 2024, the target breakdowns Q1-24, Q2-24, Q3-24, and Q4-24 are created with the Target values $2.5M, $5M, $7.5M, and $10M respectively.
- Financial planning for planning items
-
- Customize widgets to view the financial details, such as allocated budget, EAC, Variance, a breakdown of planned costs, and actuals to date by cost type.
- Export Costs or Baseline comparison information as Microsoft Excel or CSV formats. Use these files to share the financial performance of your planning items to relevant business stakeholders, even if they don't have access to your ServiceNow instance.
- Create expense lines to capture any unplanned costs to meet your work requirements without associating them to any forecasted planned costs. For more information, see Add or edit expense lines.
- Delete any de-scoped cost plans using the row context menu icon (
) to manage your financials.
- Save your preferences to retain the customizations you have made, such as viewing or hiding columns and viewing time scope.
- Scoring enhancements
-
- Apply filters on the Scoring page to view the required data set. These filters are saved as your preferences. This also helps you view the same data set and continue your planning when you log back in.
- When a demand is converted to a project, the score and rank of the item are automatically copied to the newly created project.
- Export data of portfolio plan items from Scoring or Prioritization
- Export data of your portfolio plan items from the Scoring page or the List view of the Prioritization tab into a Microsoft Excel or CSV file. Share the data and collaborate with your business stakeholders. If the filters are applied on the view, the filtered data is exported.
For more information, see Export planning items data from Scoring to Excel or CSV and Export data of portfolio plan items from Prioritization to Excel or CSV.
- Strategic Planning with PPM, Agile 2.0, and SAFe
-
- The Program field has been added to all planning item tables and the Program and Portfolio fields have been added to the Epic [rm_epic] table to support the Project Program lens.
- Enable the Sync tags option on the Table Map form for each planning item table to synchronize the tags from alignment to the execution tables and vice versa. By default, the value is set to true. If there are any existing tags, the tags are automatically synced from alignment to the execution tables and vice versa. For more information about the Table Map form, see Table map form.
- The Flow type mapping for planned dates of the Demand [dmn_demand] table is updated to both alignment to execution and execution to alignment.
- Operation work in Capacity Planning
- Create operation resource assignments for your group and view the updated capacity in Capacity Planning view.
UI changes
- Product feedback UI changes
- Added the Votes field to view the number of votes received for feedback from the idea portal.
- Added the preview record icon to view feedback or product idea details within the List view.
- Added the Importance field to view and prioritize the feedback.
- New presentation list format to support pagination on product feedback and product idea tables.
- Financial UI changes
- Added widgets to display financial information, such as costs and variance.
- Added the Export button (
) to access the export options for financials.
- Wider side panels to manage your cost plans and expense lines by accessing more customizable form fields.
- New New expense line button to record unplanned expenses.
- The Cost duration option is renamed to Cost distribution in the New cost plan form.
- Prioritization UI changes
- Added labels and colors to the Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have (MoSCoW) values to quickly identify and sort the planning items.
- The existing MoSCoW values Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have have been renamed to 1 - Must have, 2 - Should have, 3 - Could have, 4 - Won’t have respectively to sort based on importance.
- Reorder the columns in the List view by dragging them horizontally.
- In the Personalization side panel of the List view, any selected columns are stacked on the top and the unselected columns are displayed in alphabetical order below the selected columns.
- In the Personalization side panel of the Kanban view, Swimlane has been renamed to Horizontal lane.
- Scoring UI changes
- Added colors to the Confidence and Effort attributes of the RICE framework. View the planning items quickly based on high confidence and low effort and prioritize the items accordingly.
- Search and select your scoring framework from the Scoring framework window while creating or editing a portfolio plan. For more information, see Create a portfolio plan in Strategic Planning.
- The Advanced view of the Scoring Framework Attribute form is accessible by default. For more information, see Create a final score attribute.
- Reorder the columns by dragging them horizontally.
- In the Personalization side panel, any selected columns are stacked on the top and the unselected columns are displayed in alphabetical order below the selected columns.
- Goals UI changes
- The symbols for unit of measure for targets have been added in the List tab of Goals to identify the unit of measure of a target. The values and unit of measure symbols for the Base value, Target value, and Actual value fields appear on the List tab of Goals.
- In the Personalization side panel of the List tab and the Hierarchy tabs, any selected columns are stacked on the top and the unselected columns are displayed in alphabetical order below the selected columns.
- The Set target option on the row context menu (
) has been renamed to Add target.
- The Goal column and Target column have been merged into one column called Goals and targets. This column has been frozen for a seamless experience when scrolling the page horizontally in the List view or the Hierarchy view.
- The Goal Relationship [sn_gf_goal_m2m_relationship] table has been renamed to the Goal/Target Relationship table. Also, the Primary goal field on that form has been renamed to Primary. For more information, see Goal/Target Relationship form.
- Added the Primary target field to all planning item tables and execution tables to support the target relationship.
- Added colors to the Target value and Actual value fields on the List view and the Hierarchy view.
- The Actual Value Source Configuration section has been renamed to the Target Automation section.
- On the Target form, the Automate actual value option has been moved to the Target Automation section, and the default value for the Cumulative target field has been changed to true. For more information on the Target form, see Target form.
Changed in this release
- Enable or disable scoring frameworks
- Enable or disable the base system scoring frameworks as needed. Enabling or disabling the scoring frameworks can be done only by administrators.
Deprecations
- Product idea deprecations
- The product idea overview page has been deprecated in the Washington DC release.
Activation information
Install Strategic Planning by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.
Accessibility information
- Support for truncation
- The following views of the Strategic Planning Workspace were updated to show the truncated text for non-interactive elements when the Enable keyboard focus on truncated text accessibility user preference is turned on.
- List view of the Prioritization tab and the Goals page
- Hierarchy views of the Prioritization tab and the Goals page
- Timeline view of portfolio plan and free-form roadmaps
- Scoring
- Capacity Planning
This enhancement supports sighted users who rely solely on a keyboard to use the ServiceNow platform. For more information, see Configure Next Experience accessibility preferences.
- Invisible Controls
- The following views of the Strategic Planning Workspace were updated to automatically display controls that aren’t normally visible when the Show all buttons without the need to hover accessibility user preference is turned on.
- List view of the Prioritization tab and the Goals page
- Hierarchy view of the Prioritization tab and the Goals page
- Timeline view of portfolio plan and free-form roadmaps
- Scoring
- Capacity Planning
This enhancement supports users with cognitive and physical disabilities, such as low vision or mobility limitations, who use the ServiceNow platform. For more information, see Configure Next Experience accessibility preferences.