Change is constant. Companies struggle to keep up with changing priorities and balance current work with incoming demand. As priorities shift, companies lack the visibility to make data-driven decisions on which initiatives to keep, retire, or newly fund. Simply working on more initiatives and adding more resources doesn’t provide value. Without visibility into how initiatives tie into strategy, it’s difficult for companies to holistically plan and execute value driven initiatives and eliminate work that doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) enables organizations to deliver value faster by providing an end-to-end view of initiatives from ideation to delivery. With a single source of truth and built in workflows, organizations can align work to strategy and measure benefits. SPM seamlessly connects ideation, demand, and project delivery with integrated financials allowing organizations to pivot at a moment's notice when strategies change. Leaders have the ability to visualize work with portfolio lenses and roadmaps for an at-a-glance view of initiatives and team are empowered to deliver work faster using any methodology (waterfall, agile, or hybrid). By accelerating productivity and aligning work to strategy, organizations can focus on providing value and reducing cost.
In the Vancouver release, SPM further aligns value to strategy with these key features:
Work on what truly matters.
Product feedback – Work on initiatives that customers find valuable. Product feedback provides a single repository to analyze feedback and turn ideas into actionable planning items connected to strategic portfolios, enabling organizations to prioritize initiatives that provide value.
- Quickly convert emails into feedback using an Outlook Add-In
- Combine feedback from multiple sources in a Product Idea
- Link Product Ideas to Goals and Planning items to coordinate across multiple teams and ensure alignment to customer needs
- Create and store collaborative documents directly on Product Ideas with the ability to tag users and embed media
- Include Product Ideas in portfolios for prioritization and road-mapping
Resource initiatives before they start
Capacity Planning – Organizations need to plan resources at the portfolio level to ensure initiatives are fully allocated. Capacity planning enables organizations to plan at a higher level and foresee risks related to resource constraints. Portfolio managers can holistically manage resource gaps and fill in those gaps by skill or role to ensure prioritized initiatives are staffed with the right resources. Capacity Planning is included in the Strategic Planning (SPM Pro) and Portfolio Planning (SPM Std) apps.
- Create resource assignments at the group, role, skill, or user level to quantify the work required to execute planning item
- Estimate effort required for Agile entities, such as SAFe epics
- Define the criteria of the resources needed to complete the work included in a portfolio
- Using a color-coded heatmap, quickly determine if there are sufficient resources to complete the planned work and take action to address conflicts before they cause disruption
Holistic overview of budgets
Financial Planning – Planners need an up-to-date estimate of the costs of their projects and portfolio items. The newly designed Financial Planning displays the actual costs for past fiscal periods and the planned cost for future fiscal periods, enabling planners to plan, reforecast, and track both labor and non-labor costs for planning items and Agile entities. Planners can also instantly generate labor costs plans from existing resource assignments. The Financial Planning enhancements are available in the Strategic and Portfolio Planning Workspaces, as well as the Project Workspace.
- Manage financials for projects, demands, epics, and Agile entities
- Generate and re-generate labor costs with one-click
- View totals costs and breakdowns by month, quarter, or year
- Add, edit, and view expense lines associated with cost plans
- Users can now enter Time sheets on Epics, which once approved will automatically be associated to the cost plans as expenses
Align to strategy and goals
Goals Framework – Work should align to strategy and goals. With a new dashboard, it’s easier than ever to track and monitor goals and targets with actionable insights and increased visibility for better decision-making. Download or update the Strategic Planning app from the ServiceNow store to take advantage of the Goals Framework enhancements.
- Enhanced dashboard to track the status and progress of goals and identify potential problems to support data-driven actions and decisions
- New List View to easily manage goals and update targets to quickly compare targets to actuals.
- Specific quarterly or yearly target breakdowns for more detailed tracking
- Define and track qualitative goals
Improve your processes
Processing Mining - For most organizations, improving processes is very manual, time consuming, and expensive. Process Mining is an in-platform capability that allows users to visualize their processes, identify bottlenecks, and determine areas for improvement using existing audit logs. Process Mining is now available as an add-on SKU to the SPM Professional License. A content pack is available to help jumpstart using Process Mining for Demand Management to quickly visualize processes, pinpoint bottlenecks and inefficiencies, map the demand management process, and collaborate with others to resolve issues.
Keep data secure
Data separation – Private information should remain private and only accessible by those who need it. With new data separation capability, organizations can now restrict access to sensitive data using the guided set-up and existing lens structures for seamless usability and maintenance. Show only what users need to see to complete their job function. Download or update the Strategic Planning or Portfolio Planning app from the ServiceNow Store.
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management offers comprehensive planning, execution, and alignment features for end-to-end visibility on your initiatives. By leveraging these new features, organizations can ensure they work on what provides the most value while eliminating those that don’t.
For more information, review the release notes and check out the Vancouver Release broadcast, then schedule a meeting and demo with your account team, or contact us here.
To learn more about these features, check out the Strategic Portfolio Management blog.
For more information on Strategic Portfolio Management, visit the product page.
