Is Strategic Planning Management the same as Portfolio Planning Workspace?

[Maddie Wolf]

Is the strategic planning management the same as portfolio planning workspace? If not, what is the difference?

[Community Alums]

Hi @Maddie Wolf ,

Strategic planning Workspace is what gets used for Portfolio Planning.

Strategic Planning uses Lenses to help you plan work for your company in a delivery perspective of your choice. Personalized portfolio plans that are created using a lens help you cascade the plans from the enterprise level down through portfolios and products or align work with an organizational goal or a value stream. Prioritize and roadmap relevant work, thus aligning the right execution teams to the right strategy.

After strategic plans are broken down into planning items such as projects or epics, you can schedule these items into your product or portfolio roadmaps. Using hybrid roadmaps, you can roll up both Waterfall and Agile work items to a shared initiative. You can also plan capacity and financials for each of these planning items all from a single workspace.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/washingtondc-it-business-management/page/product/alignment-planne...

So Yes, Both are same 😊

[Namita Mishra]

Hi @Maddie Wolf ,

As Sandeep has mentioned both Strategic Planning workspace and Portfolio planning workspace are used to plan your work items - these work items can be epic, demand, project, initiative, capabilities, business application etc...

In terms of ServiceNow application, they are different and below are the differences:

	Strategic Planning Workspace	Portfolio Planning Workspace
Who can use	Customers with SPM Pro license	Customers with SPM Standard license
Available Left Panel Menu	Product Feedback Portfolio Planning Enterprise Agile Planning Lists Resource Capacity Settings	Portfolio Planning Lists Resource Capacity
In the Portfolio Planning -> L1 Menu options are	Goals Scoring Planning	Planning
Portfolio Planning -> Planning	3 tabs are present: Prioritization Roadmap Capacity Planning in Prioritization -> List, Hierarchy, & Kanban views are present. In Roadmap -> Timeline, & Kanban views are present.	Tabs are same as Strategic planning workspace i.e. Prioritization Roadmap Capacity Planning However, in Prioritization only List & Hierarchy views are present In Roadmap -> only Timeline view is  present.
Supported planning items	Demand, Project, Epic, and custom items	Demand and Project
Supported planning items for high level planning	Strategic program, Initiatives, and any custom	Program
Number of OOTB Lenses Available	8	3
Name of the available OOTB lenses	Organization Project Portfolio Project Program Goal Product Strategic Investments Value Streams Business capability - This enables Enterprise Architect to create capability roadmap & share with stakeholder. In other words, this creates the capability view for business to get approval, resources, funding and above all share the future plan with the stakeholders.	Organization Project Portfolio Project Program
Modify OOTB lenses	Yes	Yes
Creation of New lenses	Yes	No

Hope this helps, if it does please mark the answer as correct answer.

TIP: Best way to remember is that portfolio planning is mainly focused for the users who work using waterfall entities and not interested in aligning their work with strategies and goals whereas Strategic portfolio Planning is best suited for the users who manage Agile, SAFe, Waterfall and Hybrid entities and would like to get OOTB widgets to track their work by strategies and goals.

Thank You!

Namita Mishra

[Namita Mishra]

Hi @Maddie Wolf ,

I re-read your question and realized that your query is related to strategic planning management w.r.t portfolio planning workspace.

So first let's understand the concept of "Strategic planning management" - This is basically an enterprise level initiative and it's main objective is to:

1. Set the strategies and goals 

2. Share the strategies and goals across the entire enterprise so that every person can get a sense of pride in their work - fulfilling the goal

3. De-prioritize the initiatives (in other words any work) that is not aligned to goals

4. Focus the resources - labor as well as non-labor and funds to the prioritized initiatives

5. At any given point in time, track the progress of the goals

6. Identify the gaps quickly and easily so that it can be fixed proactively.

7. Track planned vs achieved value without generating multiple reports

In simple terms, strategic planning management ensures that strategies and goals are visible at every layer and entire organization is working to achieve the set goals and targets.

Having said that, portfolio planning workspace helps you in planning & creating the roadmap for the waterfall entities. OOTB it does not provide strategies and goals view aligned to these work entities.

To achieve "true" strategic planning management, I would recommend using strategic planing workspace of SPM.

Please refer previous response to get a difference between portfolio planning and strategic planning workspaces.

Hope this answers the question and if it does, please mark it as correct answer.

Thank You,

Namita Mishra

[KSiegel]

@Maddie Wolf - Let me add a slightly different interpretation of your question to the above responses. The Strategic Portfolio Management application previously known as IT Business Management is a collection of modules that support the lifecycle of both Agile, Hybrid and Waterfall projects / products.

SPM includes modules for Idea / Demand, Project, Agile Development, Resource Management, Time Tracking and SPW (Strategic Planning Workspace). To answer your original question from that perspective, SPW is a module or capability within SPM. SPW and PPW are similar and their capabilities are differentiated by licensing. SPW requires a Pro license and PPW requires a Standard license.

All the details Namita provided above fully explains the difference between SPW and PPW.