SPW, Portfolio Workbench, Demand Workbench - understanding the planning ecosystem of SPM

JR Laprime · ‎11-03-2023

Good morning,

Our organization is looking to roll out Strategic Planning Module to take advantage of the great tools and capabilities in the Strategic Planning Workbench. What I am trying to wrap my head around is how these new tools play with the existing SPM tools of Portfolio and Demand Workbenches.

My interpretation is that the Portfolio and Demand Workbenches are the pre-planning tools.

Demand Workbench is used to assess new demands and determine which should be activated or rejected. This would be especially useful in reviewing the ad hoc demand submissions that occur after yearly planning is completed.
Portfolio Workbench is used is yearly planning efforts for what-if scenario planning and drafting a recommended portfolio yearly plan.
Strategic Planning Workspace would use the outputs of the pre-planning efforts in the forementioned tools as inputs to finalizing a strategic plan, prioritizing the approved/committed work, and building out roadmaps.

Am I in the ballpark or am I missing the mark with my understanding of these tools? How do others leverage these (and potentially other legacy SPM) tools with the new Strategic Planning Module/Workbench capabilities? What best practices or ServiceNow product recommendations may exist for leveraging these?

As always, thanks in advance to this great ServiceNow Community and all your continued help!

Carina Hatfield · ‎11-05-2023

Hi JR,

Thank you for the post. It's a thoughtful approach to how you can think of our current experiences. We actually are going to be adding scenario planning in the Strategic Planning Workspace in 2024. There is a design partnership program if you would like to join. Feel free to reach out to galit.benari@servicenow.com to learn and provide feedback. She would love to talk to you about what you are doing with portfolio workbench as well.

Currently, the legacy Demand Management is an input into Strategic Planning Workspace. Many of our customers use it and have customized it. We would like to move it into the next experience but will be conducting some discovery efforts first to figure out if it should be a separate experience or integrated fully into strategic planning workspace.

For anyone else in the community that would want to provide inputs into this discussion, it is very much welcomed. It's a journey to move the older experiences into the new workspaces so we love to be able to collaborate with our customers!

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GChanner · ‎04-03-2025

Hi @Namita Mishra @Carina Hatfield

We are encouraging our users to use the Strategic Planning Workspace however we run into 2 issues:

1. Unable to create a project from a demand in the SPW.
In the legacy UI they can do this using the 'Create Project' option in the related links. This means they'll have to jump over to the legacy UI, create the project then go back to the workspace?

2. How does a project manager qualify and approve a Demand in SPW? Do you have to first use the legacy demand module?

The goal is to migrate users to SPW but it seems some functionalities are missing.

Can you assist or provide steps/guidance on this critical issue as it is impeding us from fully using the Strategic Planning Workspace.

Thanks
Garfield

Namita Mishra · ‎04-04-2025

Hi @GChanner ,

Thanks for contacting the community. Hope you are doing well.

In every family and store release the workspaces are bringing in more and more capabilities focusing on ease of use for different personas..

I agree with you that demand to project conversion capability is required from the workspace and the good news is it is in the backlog.

Have a Great Friday!

Thank You!

Namita Mishra

Carina Hatfield · ‎04-24-2025

@GChanner - We are working on a plan for this right now. SPW was designed for project to get prioritized using the planning state which was an attempt to rationalize all the different states across demands, epics, and projects. I'll take ownership that we could have executed better on this.

I'm going to share your post with the PM who is starting to work on designs and plans to fix this as there are different approaches we can take. If you have any interest in providing more detailed feedback, I'm happy to connect you with the PM. Thanks!