Lenses in Strategic Planning
Summarize
Summary of Lenses in Strategic Planning
Lenses in Strategic Planning offer different perspectives tailored to planning managers at various organizational levels. They enable the creation of personalized portfolio plans that help prioritize and align work with high-level initiatives and goals. By selecting a lens, you choose a specific perspective—such as Organization or Product—that suits your role and planning needs.
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Lens Structure
Each lens consists of a multi-level structure made up of entities representing different planning levels within your company. Portfolio plans are built at one of these entity levels, allowing you to prioritize and plan work such as epics, projects, or demands associated with the bottom entity of the lens. You can use predefined lenses or build custom lenses with up to six levels for tailored planning.
Pre-defined Lenses and Their Use Cases
Strategic Planning provides nine pre-defined lenses designed for various planning roles:
- Organization: Enables department or business unit heads to plan and track work aligned across company levels.
- Product: For product leaders and managers to plan, fund, and prioritize product-related work.
- Digital Product: Facilitates planning and roadmapping for digital products; integrates with Digital Product Release Workspace if installed.
- Strategic Investments: Allows strategy leaders and EPMOs to oversee strategic initiatives and programs.
- Goals: Supports portfolio managers and business unit heads in creating and tracking goals, aligning and prioritizing related work.
- Value Stream: Enables value stream and ART managers to plan and prioritize work within value streams.
- Project Portfolio: For product and portfolio managers to manage project portfolios.
- Business Capability: Used by enterprise architects for planning based on business capabilities or applications; requires Enterprise Architecture Workspace.
- Project Program: Allows portfolio and program managers to plan and roadmap work across programs.
Customization and Next Steps
Administrators can modify existing lenses or configure new ones to meet specific planning requirements. Planning managers can begin by exploring portfolio plans to align their work with business strategies effectively.
Lenses represent planning perspectives, which would be different for planning managers at different levels in an organization. Lenses enable you to create personalized portfolio plans through which you prioritize and align work with high-level initiatives and goals.
Lenses overview
Lenses in Strategic Planning indicate a perspective in which you can plan and fund work. By selecting a lens, you choose a planning perspective to prioritize and align your work in. For example, if you're a department leader, you can choose the Organization lens. If you're a product manager, you can choose the Product lens.
Lens structure
Each lens in Strategic Planning consists of a structure that is made up of entities. Lens entities represent different levels of planning for your company. You can build portfolio plans at one of these levels.
For example, the Organization lens has a Company, Business Unit, and Department as its entities. As the head of the Support department, you can create a portfolio plan at the department level. Then, you can prioritize the work that is assigned to the department and plan a roadmap for the prioritized work. This work can be in the form of epics, projects, demands, or any other custom type.
Get started with one of the pre-defined lenses, or build a custom lens structure, with up to six levels, to suit your planning needs.
Pre-defined lenses and their structure
Strategic Planning provides nine pre-defined lenses to get you started with building your portfolio plans - Project Portfolio, Project Program, Organization, Strategic Investments, Product, Digital Product, Value Stream, Goals, and Business Capability. Planning managers can use these lenses based on their role at the company.
| Lens | Planning levels (Lens entities) | Planning manager | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organization |
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Plan and track the delivery of work in my organization and visualize how the work is aligned to various levels. |
| Product |
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Plan, fund, and prioritize work from a product lens. |
| Digital Product |
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Plan, prioritize, and roadmap work for digital products. If the ServiceNow® Digital Product Release Workspace is installed, the planning items associated with the product enhancement appear in the Planning items tab of the Release scope page in Digital Product Release Workspace. For details, see Scope of a release. |
| Strategic Investments |
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Plan, manage, and provide oversight for strategic initiatives or programs regardless of who is doing the work. |
| Goals |
Goal |
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| Value stream |
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Plan, fund, and prioritize work for a value stream. |
| Project Portfolio |
Portfolio |
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Plan, fund, and prioritize work in your project portfolios. |
| Business Capability |
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Enterprise architect | Plan, prioritize, and roadmap the work based on your business capabilities or business applications. This lens can be used only if the ServiceNow® Enterprise Architecture Workspace is installed. |
| Project Program |
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Plan, prioritize, and roadmap the work in your programs. |
- If you're an admin, you can modify the structure for these pre-defined lenses or configure a new lens altogether based on your planning manager's requirements. For more information, see Lens configuration in Strategic Planning.
- If you're a planning manager, learn about portfolio plans to start aligning your work with the business strategy. See Portfolio plans in Strategic Planning.