Portfolio Planning release notes
Summarize
Summary of Portfolio Planning release notes
The ServiceNow® Portfolio Planning application in the Yokohama release introduces enhancements to improve product and portfolio management by aligning work with organizational objectives. It offers new financial insights, scenario planning, dashboards, customizable views, and collaboration features to support efficient budget use, increased ROI, and informed decision-making.
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Key Features
- Financial Data Visualization: View rolled-up financial costs and benefits at the portfolio level for Epics, Demands, and Projects across different time scales. Track budget, planned cost, variance, actuals, and remaining estimates by expense or cost type. Monitor monetary benefits including forecasts and variances.
- Financial Scenario Planning: Create and manage multiple financial scenarios to simulate budgets, optimize portfolio outcomes, and prevent overspending. Allocate budgets automatically from approved scenarios and leverage budget allocation properties for data-driven decisions.
- Dashboards: Consolidate key metrics and data from multiple sources into customizable dashboards. Add widgets to visualize important data, track progress, and share dashboards with stakeholders for collaborative decision-making.
- Custom Views for Portfolio Plans and Roadmaps: Create, edit, and switch between personal or public views with customizable display preferences such as column selection, grouping, filtering, milestones, dependencies, and tracking modes. Views persist across tabs in live mode for consistent user experience.
- Real-time Collaboration: Edit Planning item Docs concurrently with multiple users, with colored cursors showing editor locations. Full Docs v6.6.0 functionality requires Portfolio Planning Workspace v8.5.0.
- User Interface Updates: Introduction of a new Financials tab with renamed fields for clarity (e.g., ETC to Remaining Estimates). Financial views and widgets are enhanced for scenario planning. Capacity Planning tab renamed to Capacity.
Important Information for Customers
- Upgrading to Portfolio Planning v8.8.0 clears previously saved custom view settings; users must recreate views as needed.
- Portfolio Planning is available for installation via the ServiceNow Store and requires a request to install.
Related Applications
Portfolio Planning integrates well with ServiceNow® Strategic Planning to align strategy with execution by defining and tracking organizational goals and supporting multiple methodologies including traditional, agile, and hybrid.
The ServiceNow® Portfolio Planning application helps you enhance traditional product and portfolio management by visualizing the alignment of work with organizational objectives. Portfolio Planning was enhanced and updated in the Yokohama release.
Portfolio Planning highlights for the Yokohama release
- View the rolled-up financial costs and benefits data of your planning items in the new Financials tab in the Planning page.
- View the financial data of planning items while creating multiple prioritization scenarios to promote efficient use of budget and help increase the return on investment (ROI).
- Monitor performance, track progress, and make informed decisions related to planning and execution using dashboards.
- Create, edit, and switch views in portfolio plans and free-form roadmaps with display preferences.
See Portfolio Planning for more information.
Important information for upgrading Portfolio Planning to Yokohama
After upgrading to Portfolio Planning v8.8.0, the custom view settings previously saved under user preferences will be cleared. You must reapply these changes and create views as needed. For instructions, see Create a portfolio plan view in Portfolio Planning and Create a free-form roadmap view in Portfolio Planning.
New in the Yokohama release
- View financial data of your planning items at the portfolio level
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- View the rolled-up financial costs and benefits data of your planning items Epics, Demands, and Projects at the portfolio level for different time scales and ranges.
- View the financial values such as the Budget, Planned cost, Variance, Actuals, and Remaining Estimates of your planning items by expense type or cost type.
- View the Forecasts, Actuals, and Variance of your planning items for monetary benefits.
- View the financial data of the planning items while creating multiple prioritization scenarios to promote efficient use of budget and to help increase ROI.
- Create and manage financial scenarios of planning items
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- Optimize your portfolio by creating financial scenarios to validate and arrive at a profitable outcome.
- Plan and manage the budget of the planning items in a simulation mode for efficient financial planning and to help prevent overspending.
- Manage prioritization and budget allocation of the planning items to meet business priorities.
- Compare financial scenarios and automatically allocate the planned budget from approved scenarios to planning items.
- Enable a budget allocation property to analyze finances in scenario planning and take effective decisions using data-driven insights.
- Dashboards for data analysis and decision-making
- Consolidate key data and metrics from multiple sources onto dashboards, enabling you to monitor performance, track progress, and make informed decisions related to planning and execution.
You can create, edit, and copy a dashboard, customizing as needed. Add widgets to a dashboard to display key data, metrics, and visualizations. You can also share dashboards to collaborate with the business stakeholders who have access to the portfolio plan.
- Create and share views for portfolio plans and free-form roadmaps
- Create, edit, and switch views in portfolio plans and free-form roadmaps using display preferences. You can create personal views that are private to you or public views that can be shared with stakeholders who have access.
Portfolio plan display preferences include column selection, grouping and filtering. Free-form roadmap preferences include grouping, milestones selection, dependencies selection, and tracking mode. The portfolio plan view saves your display preferences across the Prioritization, Roadmap, Capacity, and Financials tabs.Note:Portfolio plan views are available only for the Planning module and are supported in live mode, but not in scenario mode.
- Real-time collaboration for Planning item Docs
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Edit a doc page concurrently with multiple other editors. Colored cursors denote the current location of editors on the page. You can choose to show or hide these indicators.
Note:To use the full functionality of Docs v6.6.0 within Portfolio Planning Workspace, upgrade to Portfolio Planning Workspace v8.5.0. For more information, see the Incompatibility After Upgrading Docs to Version 6.0.0 [KB2017926] article in the Now Support Knowledge Base.
UI changes
- Financials UI changes
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- New Financials tab in the Planning page.
- The name of the ETC field is changed to Remaining Estimates.
- The name of the EAC field is changed to Forecast.
- The name of the Actuals to date field is changed to Actuals.
- New Financials view in scenario planning.
- New financial widgets in the compare scenario page.
- Capacity Planning tab name change
- The name of the Capacity Planning tab in the planning view is changed to Capacity.
Activation information
Install Portfolio Planning by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.