Roadmaps in Strategic Planning
Strategically plan work for your company using visual roadmaps in Strategic Planning Workspace.
As your organization grows and priorities change, it’s important to have the flexibility of changing existing plans and making new plans with ease. Using roadmaps, you can create a layout of current and upcoming plans while aligning them with your business objectives. Share these visual plans with other stakeholders across the organization, drive meaningful conversations, and validate common understandings.
Each roadmap is a high-level block of work, prioritized by different planning personas such as enterprise project managers, portfolio managers, project managers, or others. Roadmaps also provide insights to the stakeholders while guiding the delivery teams during development.
- Portfolio plan roadmaps
- Free-form roadmaps
- Hybrid roadmaps
- Roadmap-level milestones
- Planning item-level milestones
- Planning item dependencies
- Tracking mode
Portfolio plan roadmaps
By creating a flexible portfolio plan using lenses, you can prioritize and roadmap work for your portfolio. Use these portfolio roadmaps to plan and track work in different perspectives of the organization separately, while connecting them to the high-level plans of the company.
Create a portfolio plan to get started. You can view and edit your roadmap in both Roadmap and Kanban tabs.
Free-form roadmaps
Free-form roadmaps provide you the flexibility of planning and tracking work from different units of your company, such as work across multiple portfolios.
Using a filter condition, you can define what kind of work items you want on your roadmap. If you want to have a roadmap dedicated to just the projects of your department, define a roadmap for projects to start tracking the progress of current projects and create plans for new ones.
You can view and edit your free-form roadmap in both Timeline and Kanban views.
Hybrid roadmaps
In Strategic Planning, with both the portfolio roadmaps and free-form roadmaps, you can build hybrid roadmaps. For example, you can have a combination of projects, demands, and epics in a single view.
Milestones on the roadmap
You can create milestones for your roadmap, or for each planning item on the roadmap.
- Roadmap-level or portfolio-level milestones
The milestones created at the roadmap level can help with tracking launch dates or key events during that roadmap's timeline. To learn how to create roadmap milestones, see Add milestones for a roadmap.
- Planning item milestones
Using the milestones created at the item level, you can focus better on strategic outcomes. These milestones help with tracking deadlines or other important dates. You can access milestones on all the planning items such as projects, demands, epics, and others.
From the roadmap, milestones can be created and updated for all types of planning items, except on projects. Project milestones are read-only on the roadmap because any changes to project milestones may impact the associated project plans. So, it is recommended to create or update project milestones using Project Workspace in Project Portfolio Management (PPM).
To learn how to create item-level milestones on a roadmap, see Add milestones for roadmap items.
Planning item dependencies
While planning, it is essential to know how your planning items are connected with each other. Unless you know the dependency for each item, you might miss prioritizing time-critical projects or demands. This lack of information may also put you at risk of not scheduling the right work for the right time period.
Dependencies on the roadmap help you visualize these relationships between the planning items, so that you can adjust their scheduling accordingly.
In Strategic Planning, you can create simple or hybrid dependencies. For example, you can establish dependencies between two projects or between a project and an epic. Also, planning items can have dependency on items within the same portfolio plan or on items that aren't planned yet.
The dependency lines help you easily identify the items that may have to be prioritized together. Such easy identification of relationships between planning items provides better collaboration and facilitates enhanced decision making in the planning process.
To learn about creating and managing dependencies, see Add dependencies for roadmap items.
Tracking mode in roadmaps
Track status, progress, and metrics for each item on the roadmap. Using the status indicators and the percentage complete score on the planning item bars, make informed decisions ahead of time and easily communicate your work progress to the stakeholders.
Alignment of your work with business goals
Each planning item that you create and schedule into a roadmap can associate to high-level business goals. Strategic Planning enables you to visualize how your work is aligned to these business goals directly from the roadmap view.
On the roadmap, you can group your planning items by the Strategic priority and Primary goal fields so that you can map your work to their goals.
Better together with other ServiceNow® applications
- Optimize portfolio performance by monitoring services and their performance levels in a comprehensive roadmap.
- Make informed budgetary decisions and deliver shared outcomes by prioritizing backlogs and managing roadmaps of business applications.