Organizations need to set strategies to deliver value faster than ever while managing change in this disruptive market. They must also 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 address these challenges and be successful. Our innovations and updates for the Utah release are as the following:
- Name change from Alignment Planner Workspace to Strategic Planning
- New enhancements to Strategic Planning
- Goal Framework for SPM
- Benchmarks
Alignment Planner Workspace name change to Strategic Planning and Portfolio Planning
We strive to make our products and their value to our customers well-defined. Therefore in the Utah release, we are excited to announce that we are splitting the Alignment Planner Workspace application into two applications “Strategic Planning” in the SPM Pro package and “Portfolio Planning” in the SPM Standard package. These two new names align with our roadmap to enhance our customer experience and simplify the installation process.
Improve alignment to drive strategic outcomes
Strategic Planning Workspace (formerly known as Alignment Planner Workspace) is a robust planning workspace to prioritize all work, align goals, visual roadmap, and track progress when using Agile, waterfall, or hybrid approaches. We introduced Lenses in Strategic Planning for the November release which provided a pre-defined structure that represented how an organization prioritizes, funds, and plans work.
This feature empowers planners with the flexibility to visualize delivering work from different perspectives such as Organization, Product, Strategic investments, or through a Custom configuration. We added 3 new lenses in the Utah release -Value stream, Goals, and Project portfolio. These 6 lenses offer flexible options for customers to plan and track work in their organization.
Let’s drill a bit into how the lenses work. Department heads may want to see the portfolio plan through the perspective of the organization lens, by entity types such as company, business units, and departments – and related planning items such as demands, projects, and epics. While strategy leaders focus on Strategic Investments – with entity types including company, strategic priorities, initiatives, and strategic programs.
Figure 1: Strategic Investment Lens to visualize work
Another enhancement to Strategic Planning is the flexibility we offer with Portfolio Prioritization. With portfolio prioritizations, planners can intuitively map and visually progress planning items. They can review new and existing work and determine which of those work items must be prioritized to achieve their organization's goals and outcomes in support of their company’s business strategy. The prioritization can be seen in 3 formats - list, Kanban, and hierarchy view.
Track progress toward strategic goals efficiently
The Goal Framework for SPM (formerly known as Advanced Goal Framework) monitors progress against goals and targets in real-time by enabling target actuals to be collected and aggregated automatically within the Now Platform through configured target sources. Any ServiceNow table or a combination of tables such as benefit plans, cost plans, surveys, and performance analytics indicators can be configured as a target source. This insight empowers business leaders to better track how their work is contributing to strategy.
Make data-driven decisions to drive continuous improvements
Most organizations have been unable to gain visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) and trends without allocating significant budgets and resources for expensive analytics. Moreover, any benchmarking effort to compare the organization’s performance relative to industry averages has little lasting success.
ServiceNow Benchmark is a Now platform capability that now SPM uses. Business owners can compare the performance of their company to the industry averages of their peers with the industry’s largest anonymized customer data set. They can analyze and optimize performance with actionable insights based on KPI values to drive continuous improvements.
Figure 2: Actionable insights based on industry KPI
Sign up for the Now Platform® Utah release broadcast to create value across your organization with the platform for digital business. Register today and see how the world works with ServiceNow.
