Team-Level Agile Planning with Collaborative Work Management
If your team plans work in sprints, manages backlogs, or uses agile methods to deliver projects, Collaborative Work Management (CWM) provides the tools you need—with the flexibility to work beyond just stories.
What is CWM?
Collaborative Work Management is ServiceNow's modern solution for team-level work planning and execution. It gives teams a shared workspace to plan sprints, visualize work across multiple views, and collaborate in real-time—all while staying connected to the broader ServiceNow platform.
Core Capabilities
- Agile Sprint Planning: Create sprints, manage your backlog, track story points, and plan capacity. CWM supports the fundamental agile workflows teams rely on, with sprint planning views designed for both Scrum and Kanban approaches.
- Connected Work: Here's where CWM goes beyond traditional agile tools: you can import any work type from across the ServiceNow platform—stories, incidents, change requests, tasks—and manage them all on a single board. This means your team can see operational work alongside planned work, giving you a complete picture of what's actually on your plate.
- Flexible Views and Workflows: Switch between List, Gantt, Kanban, and Sprint Planning views depending on what you need to see. Create custom columns to track the information that matters to your team. Build templates and automations to reduce repetitive work.
- Collaborative Docs: Work together on documentation in real-time, with Now Assist available to help summarize content and generate tasks from meeting notes or planning sessions.
- My Work Dashboard: See all your assigned work across boards, projects, and stories in one central location—no more hunting through multiple workspaces to figure out what you need to work on next.
- Now Assist Capabilities: Draft documents with generative AI assistance, generate acceptance criteria for stories, and connect to your AI-powered workflows.
- Strategic Alignment: Connect your team's work to enterprise goals through Strategic Portfolio Management, or scale up to Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) when you need program-level coordination across multiple teams.
For Teams Currently Using Agile Development 2.0
If you're using Agile Development 2.0 today, here's what you need to know: CWM is built on the same data model, which means your stories and epics don't need to be migrated. You can start easily transition your stories from Agile 2.0 to CWM.
Why the shift to CWM?
Agile Development 2.0 has served teams well, but it was built years ago and hasn't seen new development in some time. CWM represents our investment in modern agile capabilities—it's where new features, integrations, and AI-powered functionality will be delivered going forward. Plus, CWM offers teams more than just agile planning.
What's different about CWM?
Beyond the core agile features you're familiar with, CWM adds:
- Connected Work to manage any task type on your boards
- Custom columns and work item types
- Automations and templates
- Collaborative docs
- A more flexible, modern interface
- NowAssist
- Integration with Strategic Portfolio Management and Enterprise Agile Planning
Making the transition
Because CWM uses the same story table as Agile 2.0, you can use Connected Work to pull your existing stories into CWM boards without formal migration. You’ll need to create new sprints in CWM, so we recommend starting with future sprints as you transition. Once you add the details of your first sprint, subsequent sprints can be created with one click.
Some capabilities from Agile 2.0 aren't available in CWM yet, but they're coming:
- Scrum tasks and dependencies will be available in the March 2026 store release
- Sprint velocity and burndown reporting are planned for the second half of 2026.
If your team heavily relies on these features now, you might want to wait until early 2026 to make the switch. If those aren't blockers, you can start benefiting from CWM's capabilities today.
Getting Started with CWM
- Create a Space: Navigate to Collaborative Work Management and create a new space for your team. Share it with your team members or existing Agile assignment groups.
- Set Up Connected Work: Define which work items should appear on your board. You can filter by work type, assignment group, sprint, or any other criteria. This replaces the Unified Backlog functionality from Agile 2.0 and gives you more control over what appears on your board.
- Enable Sprint Planning: Turn on the Sprint Planning view for your board, create your sprints, and start planning. You can assign story points, set sprint capacity, and allocate work items into sprints.
- Explore Additional Features: Try out automations to set reminders or handle repetitive tasks, create templates for common work patterns, or start collaborating on docs for sprint planning or retrospectives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who should migrate to CWM in this release (Q4 2025)?
Teams that use stories and basic task types without heavy reliance on Scrum tasks, dependencies, or velocity/burndown reporting. If those features are critical to your workflow, waiting until they're available in CWM makes sense.
How can I see Scrum Tasks in CWM?
Starting in the March 2026 release, you will be able to see the Scrum Tasks aligned to your stories directly from your CWM Boards. For now, you can see them in a new tab by opening up the full detail view of a story from the side panel, or bring them into CWM via Connected Work (though they won't display in a hierarchy under their parent stories).
What about reporting?
Velocity and burndown charts are planned for the second half of 2026.
Do I need to migrate my epics or stories?
No. CWM and EAP share the same epic table (sn_align_core_scrum_epic), so Scrum epics are already accessible. Stories live in the same table as Agile 2.0, so you just use Connected Work to surface them in CWM.
If you're using the older rm_epic table, you should migrate to Scrum epics before moving to CWM.
Can I use the same epic across multiple teams?
Yes. Epics are shared across teams and workspaces—just reference the same epic in each team's stories.
Who can access CWM?
Any user with an SPM or standalone CWM license. CWM is included with SPM licenses at no additional cost.
What about Scrum Programs?
Scrum Programs are available in Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP), not in CWM. If you need program-level coordination, EAP is the right solution.
Will CWM connect to Projects for hybrid work management?
This is a planned enhancement for 2026. For now, we recommend using portfolios to roll up projects and CWM boards into a single view.
Ready to Explore CWM?
- Watch this video on CWM to learn more about the capabilities, including Sprint Planning
- Find more resources including our Implementation Guide, Best Practices, and Use Cases on Community
- Install the CWM store application.
