Business Planning Portal

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Business Planning Portal

    The Business Planning Portal is a centralized interface designed for business planners to manage key business planning entities such as goals, business units, capabilities, and strategies. It enables the alignment of business goals with enterprise and business unit strategies, supporting comprehensive business planning efforts.

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    Access to the portal requires activation of the Business Planner plugin (com.snc.apm.businessplanner), which is installed alongside other Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) plugins.

    Key Features

    • Entity Management: View, create, and update business entities including goals, business units, capabilities, enterprise strategies, and business unit strategies.
    • Capability Map Integration: If Enterprise Architecture (formerly APM) is installed, planners can access a capability map to visually plan and relate business capabilities to applications.
    • Strategy Assignment: Create and assign enterprise and business unit strategies to goals. Enterprise strategies operate at a high level, while business unit strategies can be nested under enterprise or other business unit strategies.
    • Goal Tracking: Monitor and update the status of business goals, assign tasks, and relate goals to multiple strategies to ensure alignment with business plans.
    • Recent Activity Monitoring: Quickly access recently created goals, strategic objectives, and business units for efficient planning and management.

    Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers

    For ServiceNow customers involved in strategic planning, this portal provides a structured approach to define and manage business objectives and the strategies to achieve them. It helps ensure that business units and capabilities are aligned with overarching enterprise strategies, facilitating coherent and actionable business plans.

    By leveraging the capability map and strategy assignment features, planners can visualize business capabilities, relate them to applications, and coordinate efforts across business units, thus improving strategic clarity and execution.

    A business plan includes a business goal and a plan to achieve that goal. Business planning involves various entities of a business such as goals, business units, business capabilities, capability map, enterprise strategies, and business unit strategies. As a business planner you can manage these entities from the business planning portal.

    To access the business planning portal, the Business Planner (com.snc.apm.business_planner) plugin must be activated. This plugin is installed only when any one of the other Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) plugins is already installed.

    Access the business planning entities, goals, business units, enterprise strategy, business unit strategy, capabilities, and capability in the Business Planner module.

    Business planning portal for the business planner

    As a business planner, you can do various tasks from the business planning portal such as view, create, and update the business entities to achieve business goals. In addition, the Business Planner can . Use capability map for planning.

    Note:
    The role of a business planner involves only planning and managing the entities to achieve the business goal. It doesn't deal with the business applications or technologies that support the business.
    Figure 1. Business planning portal
    Business planning home page for a business planner

    The business planning portal helps the business planner to view and create goals, business unit, capabilities, and strategies.

    Number of capabilities
    Displays the number of capabilities that have been created. Click to view the list of capabilities defined for the business enterprise. Create and relate a business capability to an application if the existing capabilities don't conform to your business plan.

    If you have installed Enterprise Architecture (formerly APM), then the Map link is available. Click Map to launch the capability map.

    Strategies
    Displays the number of objectives that have been created. Click to view the list of strategic objectives that align with your business plans. Click to create a business unit strategy or an enterprise strategy to fulfill a new business plan. You can also assign strategies to a goal.
    • Enterprise strategy is at a higher level and business unit strategies can be assigned at its child level.
    • Business unit strategy is at a lower level and an enterprise strategy or a business unit strategy can be assigned as a parent strategy.
    Business Units
    A business unit is a segment of an enterprise that represents a business function. View the existing number of business units in your organization. Click to create a business unit to define its functions.
    No. of goals
    View the number of goals created to achieve a business plan. You can relate goals to many enterprise and business unit strategies. Similarly, more than one enterprise and business unit strategies can be related to more than one goal. Click a goal from the list to update its status and assign a task to it. You can also create a goal for an application strategy.
    Recent Activity
    View the recent goals, strategic objectives, and business units that you had created.