Strategic planning can make or break an organization. Set the wrong goals, or approve the wrong investments, and success for the next business period may already be impossible. Leaders are increasingly recognizing that and are embracing the concept of strategic portfolio management (SPM). This is an approach to business that seeks to combine the entire strategic lifecycle – planning; investment approval, funding and scheduling; work delivery; and benefits realization.
SPM seeks to eliminate the legacy disconnect between the strategic priorities set by leadership and the projects and epics defined by functional areas that are proposed to align with those priorities. This fragmented process frequently results in disconnects and the approval of work that simply wasn’t capable of making a meaningful contribution to the goals and objectives.
By driving everything from the top, SPM allows leaders to set the priorities, goals, and objectives, while also defining appropriate OKRs. They then decide the high-level investments to approve in order to achieve those priorities, appointing individual investment owners who are accountable for the work. Those investment owners have the autonomy to deliver work however they see fit through various teams, and deliver solutions that are then tracked with value-based metrics to ensure that the expected benefits are achieved.
Of course, in today’s world, that’s just the start. Operating environments are constantly evolving, with shifting customer expectations, emerging technological capabilities, and global competition all impacting the ability to maintain strategic plans. Organizations must therefore not only be willing and able to commit to continuous and adaptive planning, they must be able to change any aspect of the strategy lifecycle – plans, investments, work, etc. with minimal disruption and maximum effectiveness.
ServiceNow SPM institutes a modern approach to strategic planning and delivery. Collaborative strategic planning by business leaders becomes straightforward thanks to the ability to model different scenarios and compare different possible portfolio mixes. When adjustments are needed the impact of those proposed changes on dependent work, resource capacity, and other variables can be assessed and intelligent decisions made.
Once decisions have been made, they can easily and intuitively be communicated with roadmaps, allowing all business areas to achieve the same level of understanding. This ensures that everyone from executive to team member understands what is required, and how their efforts contribute to strategic success. Investment managers have visibility into their initiatives while still allowing teams to operate with any method (waterfall, agile, hybrid), structure (program, project, epic, product, etc.), and work management tool that they see fit.
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