What is the purpose of ‘planning item’ table?
SPW enables portfolio/product managers to do hybrid planning i.e., the ability to plan both waterfall (projects) and agile (epics) work together and view all the items on the same roadmap. This will help in making the necessary tradeoff decisions by considering all kinds of work in the pipeline. This will also eliminate the disconnect of planning projects and epics separately.
Project, epics, and demands are different objects. They are currently managed by customers separately in project workspace, demand management, and Agile2.0 applications. They have different fields which serve different purposes. Even if there are common fields across these three tables such as state, status, priority, etc., the values within those fields are different.
To plan these different objects in the same portfolio plan and to show them on the same roadmap, we created a new table called ‘Planning Item’ that houses all these items in one table. Only the fields that are relevant (like owner, state, status, priority, financials, etc.) for planning at portfolio level are synced into the planning item table.
What is a planning item extension?
A base planning item is extended to multiple planning item tables to contain different planning item type entities. Fields applicable to all planning item types are added into the base planning item table. Whereas the fields specific to a type are added in the respective extension of the planning item table.
Project, epic, and demand tables are internally synced with the respective extensions of the planning item table. This is a two-way sync that means, any changes done in SPW are reflected in the execution side and vice versa.
What are the different OOTB planning item types?
- The different OOTB planning items one can plan together in SPW are
- Project
- Demand
- Epic
- Product Idea
- Product idea does not have a corresponding execution table. This is a new table created in SPW to help product managers manage their product backlog.
What are custom planning item types?
- Sometimes in customer environments there is a need to plan items other than the OOTB planning item types. Ex: enhancement, themes, capabilities, etc.
- To help customers plan their own items, we allow customers to create a new custom planning type by extending the planning item table.
- OOTB, we provide five free custom planning item tables. These can be easily renamed and configured and synced with customer’s own tables that need to be included for planning. In addition to this, customers can create new custom planning types by utilizing the free additional tables quota that comes with SPM Pro license.
