Goal form

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Goal form

    The Goal form in ServiceNow enables you to create and manage goals aligned with your organizational strategic priorities. It is essential for tracking goal progress, ownership, and classification within strategic planning and operational sustainability contexts. Proper configuration of the form layout is necessary to view all fields, especially in Operational Sustainability Workspace and Strategic Planning applications.

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    Key Features

    • Goal Details: Define the goal's Name, Description, and Category such as Total Applications, Cost types, Compliance, or AI.
    • Status and Progress: Track the State (e.g., Draft, In Progress, Approved) and Status (Red, Yellow, Green, None) of goals. The Progress percentage automatically calculates based on sub-goals or targets.
    • Parent Information: Link goals to a Strategic priority and optionally a Parent goal. Assign an Impact on parent goal rating to indicate relative importance, configurable via a system property.
    • Owners & Contributors: Assign the goal to an Entity type (e.g., Business Unit or Department) and specify the Entity (e.g., HR or IT). Define the Owner and any Contributors involved in achieving the goal.
    • Duration: Set the Start and End dates for goals, defaulting to the current quarter or inherited from parent goals for sub-goals.
    • Additional Fields: Include Comments for collaboration, assign a responsible Team, and specify Classification types (Environmental, Social, Governance) for Operational Sustainability Workspace users.

    Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers

    Using the Goal form allows organizations to structure strategic goals clearly, assign responsibility, and track progress effectively within ServiceNow’s Strategic Portfolio Management and Operational Sustainability workspaces. Properly populating entity types and owners ensures goals appear correctly in portfolio plans. The ability to rate impact and classify goals enhances prioritization and reporting, supporting better decision-making aligned with business strategies.

    Use the Goal form to create goals for your organizational strategic priorities.

    Note:
    For Operational Sustainability Workspace and Strategic Planning users, to view the other fields (that are not added to the default or your custom form view) on the form in the workspace, configure the default/custom form layout. For information on how to configure the form layout, see Configuring the form layout.
    Table 1. Goal form
    Field Description
    Name Name of the goal.
    State State of the goal. The state can be Draft, In progress, Approved, Complete, Pending, Achieved, Not Achieved, or Cancelled.
    Category Category of the goal. The available options are:
    • Total Applications
    • Total Cost
    • Opex
    • Capex
    • Cloud Applications
    • Homegrown Applications
    • Support Cost
    • Labor Cost
    • Standards Compliance
    • Strategic
    • Operational
    • Tactical
    • Artificial Intelligence
    Status Status of the goal. Status can be Red, Yellow, Green, or None.
    Progress Percentage complete for the goal. The progress value is calculated automatically if the goal has sub-goals or/and targets.

    For more information on how the progress value is calculated, see Progress value calculation.
    Description Brief description of the goal.

    You can refine goal description using the Refine records skill, if the Now Assist for SPM application is installed.
    Table 2. Parent information section of the Goal form
    Field Description
    Strategic priority Name of the strategic priority that this goal is created for.
    Parent goal Name of the parent goal that this goal contributes to.
    Impact on parent goal A numerical value that represents the importance of this goal relative to sibling goals or other goals under its parent goal. By default, the value is (1) Neutral.
    The available options are:
    • (0) No impact
    • (1) Neutral
    • (2) Moderate
    • (3) High
    • (4) Very high
    • (5) Maximum
    Note:
    This field is available only when the sn_gf.weighted_average_enabled system property is set to Yes.
    Table 3. Owners & Contributors section of the Goal form
    FIeld Description
    Assigned entity type Entity type to which the goal is assigned. For example, Business Unit, Department, Company, or Portfolio.
    Assigned entity Entity to which the goal is assigned. For example,if the portfolio plan is created with Business Units, HR and IT, populate the Assigned entity type as Business Unit and Assigned entity type as HR or IT.
    Note:
    Populating the Assigned entity type and Assigned entity fields are required to display the goals in the portfolio plan.
    Owner Owner of the goal. By default, the name of the user creating the goal is populated.
    Contributors Users who contribute to the achievement of the goal.
    Table 4. Duration section of the Goal form
    Field Description
    Start date Start date for the goal. By default, the start date of the current quarter is populated. For a sub-goal, start date of its parent goal is populated.
    End date End date for the goal. By default, the end date of the current quarter is populated. For a sub-goal, the end date of its parent goal is populated.
    Table 5. Other section of the Goal form
    Field Description
    Comments Detailed comments for the goal to facilitate collaboration.
    Team Assignment group responsible for different activities in achieving the goal.
    Classification Goal classification type. The available options are Environmental, Social, and Governance. This field is applicable only for the Operational Sustainability Workspace users.