We know our customers need to set strategies to deliver value faster than ever and manage change in this disruptive market. And of course, it’s challenging for them to communicate their strategy effectively with their teams and employees, align investments and resources to their strategy responsively and track their progress.
We continue investing in our products to support our customers to be successful in the market. To respond to these challenges we enhanced our ServiceNow’s Alignment Planner Workspace (APW) with new capabilities in the November store release.
Alignment Planner Workspace provides focused planning that enables business leaders to align work with strategy, prioritize initiatives and automatically track progress against the organization’s business goals. The new enhancements include the following innovations: Lenses and Portfolio Plans for Alignment Planner Workspace and Advanced Goal Framework.
Improve alignment to drive strategic outcomes
Business leaders need a way to visualize, and group work relevant to their role to make informed decisions and communicate a shared strategy to deliver business outcomes.
With the new enhancement in the Alignment Planner Workspace, business leaders can create, manage, and share flexible portfolio plans based on their desired way of visualizing and grouping work to uncover planning insights that drive strategic outcomes.
Let’s drill a bit into what we mean by that. This new feature- Lenses for Alignment Planner Workplace provides a pre-defined structure that represents how an organization prioritizes, funds and plans work – called Lenses. This feature empowers planners with the flexibility to visualize delivering work from different perspectives such as organization, product, strategic investments, or their own configuration.
A department head may want to see the portfolio plan through the perspective of the Organization lens, by entity types such as business units or departments – and related work items such as demands, projects, and epics.While a product manager may have a more product-centric view and may prefer to visualize work through the product lens by company and product models and those work items associated with that. And a strategy leader would likely visualize work from a strategy perspective and all work related to that. This capability helps them to make informed decisions faster based on their desired planning insights as well as helps to increase work aligned to strategy to drive strategic outcomes.
Figure 1: Lenses for Alignment Planner Workspace
The other feature within APW that is part of the November release is Portfolio Plans which is a user-defined shareable portfolio that combines relevant strategy and work on a visual roadmap. So business planners can share their portfolio plans depending on their audience and what entity they want to share, so they can align their goals and roadmaps across the board.
Automatically track work progress that supports their strategic goals
We know tracking work progress in support of goals is a manual and error-prone task, especially when multiple sources contribute to a goal.
The Advanced Goal Framework within APW empowers leaders to better track how work contributes to strategy and monitor goal progress in real-time by enabling target actuals to be collected and aggregated automatically within the Now Platform.
Figure 2: Advanced Goal Framework
Watch this demo video to see these two great innovations in action.
You can find these applications on the ServiceNow store. For more information, please check the Alignment Planner Workspace page.
