Alignment Planner Workspace release notes

  • Release version: Store
  • Updated July 9, 2026
  • 7 minutes to read
    • Summarize
    Summarized using AI
    This content was generated using new OpenAI-powered functionality. Results are provided on an as is basis and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete.

    Summary of Alignment Planner Workspace release notes

    The Alignment Planner Workspace (APW) is a ServiceNow application designed to empower IT Business Management (ITBM) planning personas with an integrated experience for organizational roadmap planning and management. It offers capabilities to plan, prioritize, and visualize work across portfolios, demands, projects, and strategic goals. APW supports flexible planning perspectives via lenses and portfolio plans, enabling streamlined demand management, financial tracking, and roadmap creation aligned with organizational objectives.

    Show full answer Show less

    Key Features

    • Planning Item Lens: Introduced in version 8.15.0, enables direct planning, prioritization, and roadmapping of work items without complex organizational structures.
    • Portfolio Plans: Shareable, personalized plans built using lenses, allowing users to create and share portfolio plans easily, including public links for broader access without explicit invitations.
    • Demand Workspace: Redesigned UI integrated with AI-powered Playbooks and AI Control Tower for enhanced demand management and visibility.
    • Roadmaps and Milestones: Flexible roadmap views supporting dependencies, milestones, custom color themes, zoom, and filtering options to visualize and track planning items effectively.
    • Financials: Financial baselines support multicurrency and automatic labor cost calculations based on resource effort changes.
    • User Experience Enhancements: Expand/collapse views, improved side panels, inline backlog editing, and consistent list components for smoother navigation and usability.
    • Security and Access Controls: Enhanced access management with clear permission boundaries and roles such as snvaluestream.valuestreamadmin and snaligncore.apwadmin for managing system properties and categories.
    • Integration and Data Sync: Automatic syncing of project planning item attributes from published status reports and support for importing work items from Azure DevOps.

    Important Fixes and Improvements

    • Resolved issues with Create Demand modal, portfolio plan creation with Planning Item lens, and target reflections in financials.
    • Fixed roadmap rendering problems related to inactive users, missing lens options, and permissions inconsistencies.
    • Improved multilingual support by correcting translation and UI display issues in Spanish and other languages.
    • Restored functionality for quick edits, clickable URLs, and resource rescheduling updates.
    • Addressed UI bugs such as hidden expand buttons, incorrect tab redirects, and persistent saved view preferences.
    • Enhanced system stability with resolved issues in Portfolio Planning, Demand Workspace, and Kanban filtering.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Enables comprehensive and flexible planning across organizational levels without requiring complex setup.
    • Improves collaboration by sharing portfolio plans easily and managing access securely according to user roles.
    • Supports data-driven prioritization and financial tracking, enhancing decision-making and governance.
    • Facilitates smooth transition and integration with existing project and demand management tools.
    • Offers continuous product improvements and bug fixes to ensure a reliable and user-friendly planning environment.

    Version history for the Alignment Planner Workspace application on the ServiceNow Store.

    Important:
    For details on system requirements and family compatibility, view the application listing on the ServiceNow Store website.

    Version history

    Version 8.15.3 - July 2026
    • Fixed:
      • Resolved an issue where the Create Demand modal in Portfolio Planning did not work.
      • Resolved an issue that prevented creating a portfolio plan with the Planning Item lens when only standard Portfolio Planning was installed.
      • Resolved an issue where targets added to a portfolio plan did not reflect correctly in the Financials tab.
      • Resolved an issue where status values were incorrectly copied when duplicating planning items.
      • Resolved an issue where the Documents tab displayed a blank page in Spanish in Enterprise Agile Planning.
      • Resolved a text concatenation issue affecting translated strings in SPM Prioritization.
      • Resolved unclear empty-state messaging in the Manage Access modal.
    Version 8.15.0 - June 2026
    • New:
      • Use the Planning item lens to plan, prioritize, and roadmap work directly with planning items, without configuring organization structure, programs, portfolios, or products.
      • Added partition support for project and demand planning item tables.
      • View additional status attributes — cost, resource, schedule, and scope — for planning items in Portfolio Planning Workspace. For project planning items, these attributes are synced automatically from the latest published project status report.
      • Make a portfolio plan public and share the copied link with Portfolio Planning Workspace users, without inviting them individually or as a group.
    • Fixed:
      • Fixed an issue where the Kanban filter stopped working after upgrading to Zurich.
      • Fixed an issue where Demand Type incorrectly defaulted to "Project" when the Category was set to "Operational."
      • Fixed an issue that caused a roadmap bar to fail to render when the work item's owner was an inactive user.
      • Fixed an issue where the roadmap appeared empty when navigating to Portfolio Planning via "View Roadmap" from the EA Workspace.
      • Fixed an issue where the Select Lens option was missing in Hierarchy when the project portfolio lens was set to inactiv
      • Fixed an issue where users could see a Portfolio's name without having access to that Portfolio.
      • Fixed an issue where a Portfolio Plan viewer was able to manage access, which exceeded their permission level.
      • Fixed an issue where an Admin was unable to access the playbook in the Demand Workspace.
      • Fixed an issue where using the "Move" option to reschedule a resource or task to another date did not update the CPAAM Effort table.
    Version 8.14.0 - May 2026
    • New:
      • Added expand and collapse functionality for Portfolio Planning views.
      • Added the Category, Type, and Description fields to the new demand form view in Demand Workspace.
      • Added the NACM component for portfolio insights on the planning page.
      • Added the Demand AI Specialist side panel UX for agent activity visibility on demand records.
      • Added the ability to copy the link for a portfolio plan via the Share Actions button and Manage Access modal.
    • Changed: Updated project and demand demo data deadlines and milestones to the key type.
    • Fixed:
      • Resolved an issue where collapsing the resizable pane hid the expand button beneath the L1 menu.
      • Resolved an issue where editing a planned target redirected users to an incorrect tab in the related list.
      • Resolved an issue in the Free Form Roadmap (Kanban tab) where saved view changes were not retained after a page refresh
    Version 8.13.0 - March 2026
    • Demands:
      • Unified and streamlined demand management experience with AI-powered demand Playbook, integrated with the AI Control Tower.Note: To use Playbooks in Portfolio Planning, you need at least Playbook version 28.4.1 and ServiceNow Platform version Zurich Patch 7.
      • Demand Workspace is accessible from the Portfolio Planning Workspace, featuring a redesigned UI and improved navigation.
      • Key enhancements include priority-based sorting in hierarchy views and dynamic loading of target breakdowns for better performance.
    • Financials:
      • Financial baselines support multicurrency.
      • Labor costs are automatocally generated when there is a change in resource effort allocation at breakdown level without any change to the total requested efforts.
    Version 8.11.3 - January 2026
    • Fixed:
      • URL fields are now clickable and support direct navigation.
      • Quick edit functionality is restored in Level 1 list views.
      • Approving a portfolio plan scenario no longer removes unapproved scenarios from other portfolio plans.
      • Fixed few additional issues related to the Portfolio Planning application.
    Version 8.11.1 - December 2025
    • Roadmaps now support admin-defined custom colour themes for better visual alignment with organisational standards.
    • Portfolio plans shared with the Viewer setting are now viewable regardless of the user’s read/write access to the associated work.Note: Record pages remain read/write or read-only based on the user’s permissions.
    • SPW Lists have been uplifted to use the ServiceNow presentation list component for a more consistent user experience.
    • Guided setup is now available to SPW admins (apw_admin role). Previously, only system admins could access this functionality.
    • Added the sn_value_stream.value_stream_admin role, which includes the value_stream_user role. This new role provides create, write, and delete access to the cmn_value_stream_category table.
    • Added capability for the sn_align_core.apw_admin role to update app-specific system properties in app-alignment-planner-core.
    Version 5.0.1 - November 2022
    • New:
      • Lenses: Lens indicate the perspective by which planning managers can plan, prioritize, and fund work. For example, depending on your role, you can plan work from the perspective of a delivery organization, strategic investment, or product.
      • Portfolio plans: Portfolio plans are shareable personalized plans that a planning manager can build using lenses.
      • Portfolio Prioritization: Rank and analyze the work pipeline for a portfolio plan, to prioritize them into roadmaps.
      • (For SPM Pro licensed users) Automate the actual value of your targets for the goals by collecting the actuals from the tables such as benefit plans, cost plans, surveys/assessments, and PA Indicators.
    • Changed:
      • The Backlog page is renamed to Prioritization
      • Ad Hoc Roadmap is renamed to Free-form roadmaps
      • The main menu navigation in the workspace is updated to include the following:
        • Home: Contains navigation to Portfolio Plans, Free-form roadmaps, Goals, Prioritization and Portfolio Roadmap
        • Lists: Contains lists of entities and planning items associated with all the lenses.
      • Roadmap preferences are now saved per portfolio plan and not per user. Any personalization settings are applicable to all the users and user groups that a portfolio plan is shared with.
    • Removed: Planning Hierarchy and Planning Organizations are no longer supported.
    Version 4.1.1 - August 2022

    New:

    • Backlog changes
      • Edit the backlog items inline.
      • View the Rank as a separate column.
    • Roadmap side panel UX improvements
    Version 4.0.0 - May 2022
    • New:
      • Goals (OKRs): Define and manage your goals in APW to accomplish your organizational plans and drive business outcomes. Note: Accessing the Goals module from the workspace requires a Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM, formerly ITBM) Pro license.
      • APW Backlog:
        • Understand the work pipeline for your organization from a single consolidated view.
        • Organize the backlog list using the features such as grouping and sorting.
        • Use data points such as planned cost, planned benefit, and associated goal to review backlog items.
      • Roadmap item dependencies: Create and manage direct and indirect dependencies at the planning item level on the roadmap.
      • Apply custom filters to planning hierarchy-based roadmaps.
    • Fixed: If the planning organization for a work or planning item (that is associated with a goal already) is changed to an unsupported planning organization, the application now notifies this as an error.
    Version 3.1.0 - February 2022
    • New:
      • Guided setup for configuring APW.
      • Ability to import work items (epics) from Azure Devops into APW, provided the necessary integration app is installed and configured.
      • Support scrum and SAFe epics using single table in APW.
      • Next experience modern UI for Alignment Planner Workspace and roadmap component.
    Version 3.0.1 - November 2021
    • New:
      • Planning hierarchy: Work on same planning item at two different organisation levels.

      • Roadmap Planning:
        • Track planning items by creating milestones directly from the roadmap view, except for projects.
        • Update or delete the milestones that you added to your planning items (except for projects) so that they reflect any change of plans.
        • For projects, it is recommended to create or edit milestones from the Project workspace because they may impact the associated project plans. However, these project milestones can be accessed (read-only mode) in APW roadmaps when you integrate APW with Project Portfolio Management.
    • Changed:
      • Planning item's details are editable in side panel
      • Converted demands are hidden from the roadmap view
      • View names used by different entities are changed:
        • Workspace Preview is now APW Preview
        • Workspace New is now APW new
        • Workspace Default is now APW Default
    Version 2.0.0 - August 2021
    • New:
      • New module 'Alignment Planner Workspace'.
      • Organizational planning hierarchy.Roadmaps integrated with planning hierarchy.
      • Roadmap-level (planning organization-level) milestones.
      • Tracking mode in roadmaps.
      • Share Ad Hoc roadmaps with users
      • Ability to zoom in/out on roadmaps to adjust the timescale
    • Changed: Module to navigate to Adhoc roadmaps is renamed from 'Roadmap Planning' to 'Ad Hoc Roadmaps'.
    Version 1.0.1 - February 2021
    New: Alignment Planner Workspace provides an end-end integrated experience for the ITBM planning personas to plan the organization roadmap and manage it.