on - edited by
Luis Ataide
Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) in ServiceNow's Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)
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Welcome to the Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) Guide.
As organizations continue their business transformation journeys, the need for agile methodologies has never been more urgent. Gartner reports that 80% of organizations are either adopting or planning to adopt agile practices to enhance innovation and better respond to market dynamics. Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) is powerful functionality supporting methodologies designed to scale agile practices across the enterprise, aligning teams, departments, and strategic goals for greater coherence and impact.
ServiceNow introduces its new Enterprise Agile Planning capabilities available on the Strategic Planning Workspace (SPW) as part of its SPM Pro suite. We support standard SAFe configurations while also offering the flexibility to adapt to organization-specific agile delivery models. Your organization can integrate agile principles into large-scale operations, empowering you to manage complex initiatives, track progress, and optimize outcomes—while maintaining the agility and flexibility needed to stay ahead in today’s fast-moving market.
Watch a 5-minute overview video: ServiceNow's Enterprise Agile Planning in Strategic Portfolio Management
Aligning ServiceNow’s Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
ServiceNow’s SPM EAP capability is designed to seamlessly align with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), providing organizations with the flexibility to scale agile practices across teams of all sizes. Whether you're managing small, lightweight teams or larger, cross-functional teams that require coordination through release trains, SAFe ensures alignment at all levels—Team, Agile Release Train, Solution Train, and SAFe Portfolio—driving consistency across strategic objectives.
By leveraging SAFe best practices, ServiceNow’s SPM EAP capability enables organizations to manage and track agile initiatives at scale, promoting enhanced collaboration, accelerating delivery, and ensuring enterprise-wide alignment with business goals.
For customers who need additional granularity to manage Tasks and Defects, Agile Development 2.0 can be used at the team level which can integrate with EAP.
For Existing SAFe Customers: The previous ServiceNow SAFe application is scheduled for deprecation with the Zurich release in Fall 2025. This was announced in our Xanadu release. If you are an existing SAFe customer, please refer to the resources below for migration information.
Why Use ServiceNow’s SPM EAP?
- Scalability The capability extends agile practices across large teams and departments, ensuring agility at every level of the organization.
- Alignment with Strategic Goals By integrating agile with business strategy, our EAP capability ensures teams align with broader objectives, driving better outcomes.
- Enhanced Collaboration Fosters transparency and cross-functional cooperation by centralizing planning, tracking, and management.
- Efficient Resource Management ServiceNow’s SPM EAP capability supports resource assignments - people and time - to allow both long-term planning through high-level assignments and short-term planning through story points-based sprint planning.
- Faster Time-to-Market Streamline workflows using platform automation and improve coordination accelerate delivery, allowing organizations to respond quickly to market needs.
- Continuous Improvement SPM EAP provides data-driven insights that enable teams to refine agile practices for better results over time.
- Transparency & Accountability With clear visibility into progress, our EAP capability ensures accountability across teams, highlighting who is responsible for what.
Key Personas in Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP)
Successful EAP implementation requires collaboration across key roles:
- Portfolio Managers & Product Managers: Ensure alignment with business goals by defining product priorities and shaping the development roadmap.
- Release Train Engineers & Scrum Masters: Facilitate cross-team coordination, track progress, and address blockers to keep teams aligned with strategic objectives.
- Agile Teams: Drive execution and scale agile practices, ensuring alignment and accountability throughout the organization.
The resources and links below provide quick guidance on leveraging EAP with Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) to enhance agility, foster collaboration, and accelerate value delivery across your organization. Explore key functionalities and best practices to effectively manage portfolios and projects within the ServiceNow platform.
Resources & Links
For Existing SAFe Customers:
- Migration Plan: Guided Setup to Migrate data from SAFe to EAP
- SAFE to EAP Migration Playlist
- Full Playlist: YouTube
- Individual videos:
- Step 1 Verify EAP configuration for SAFe migration: YouTube
- Step 2 Verify table, field, and choice mapping between SAFe and EAP: YouTube
- Step 2a Modify columns to migrate from SAFe story and SAFe scrum task tables to EAP: YouTube
- Step 3 Start data migration of SAFe to EAP: YouTube
- Step 4 Add Agile Team type to SAFe groups for EAP migration: YouTube
For All Customers:
- SPM Academy: Enterprise Agile Planning - In this video, learn about EAP’s capabilities, personas, and view a demonstration by leading experts.
- Enterprise Agility ServiceNow SPM Podcast - In this podcast series, you’ll hear from IT experts, leading change agents, and rockstars that create a daily impact on their organizations and customers.
- Learn about ServiceNow’s Agile Dev 2.0 capability including features, benefits, resources and interconnectivity. EAP can be used with Agile Dev 2.0 or independently depending on the level of scaling needed.
Additional Resources:
- Strategic and Continuous Planning White Paper - Discover why IT leaders are wasting over 11% of project budgets each year – and how strategic focus can stop the leak.
- ServiceNow Store - many of the new SPM features will be delivered via the ServiceNow Store, check it out. Store Notifications can be found under the Subscribe option once you are logged on.
- Be sure to check out the SPM Community Product Page for all our Release Change Decks (also known as Delta Decks) for the latest release, as well as previous versions.
- Turbocharge your PMO eBook - Learn how transforming your PMO into a strategic hub can boost performance and drive organizational success.
- Community Podcasts - hear from IT experts, leading change agents, and rockstars that create a daily impact on their organizations and customers
Implementation Resources - resources to help you down your Agile transformation journey
- Customer Success Center - the starting point to define your success path
- Product Documentation - Detailed feature information by release
- Customer Success Stories - learn from other customer how their success was achieved
- ServiceNow Support - If you are having a challenge with ServiceNow applications, contact us on ServiceNow Support.
- Resource Center - be sure to check out the Resource Center, where you find many additional learning and enablement aids
- Now Create - an intuitive experience with prescriptive methodology, process guides, leading practices, and accelerators guiding ServiceNow implementations, and more
- Enterprise Agile Planning Process Guide on Now Create
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Integrating Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) with Jira or Azure DevOps (ADO) This article contains the step-by-step instructions for setting up an integration between EAP and (Jira or ADO).
- Demand to EAP Item Conversion Configuration - this article contains a full walkthrough for configuration for the stop-gap of conversion until it is available within the Products.
- Agile Iteration capacity in EAP based on Agile Group capacity (points) - this article contains a configuration to set the Agile Iteration capacity from the Agile Group capacity (points)
Learning and Enablement on Now Learning - Training is often overlooked until it's needed so we highly recommend starting your training early to ensure you and your teams are fully informed and aware of the features and functionality of EAP and Agile Development 2.0:
Other training available:
