Combined Strategic Planning release notes for upgrades from Yokohama to Zurich

Consolidated page of all release notes for Strategic Planning from Yokohama to Zurich.

How to use this page

To help you prepare for your upgrade, we have combined the cross-family Strategic Planning release notes onto one page. Read this summary of the new features, changes, and updated information for your product from Yokohama to Zurich.

Tip:

If there were no updates for a release notes section in a certain family release, we included a short note for your reference. For example, if a product did not have any updates in Tokyo, the row says "No updates for this release."

Important information for upgrading Strategic Planning to Zurich

Before you upgrade to Zurich, review these pre- and post-upgrade tasks and complete the tasks as needed.

Release	Release notes
Yokohama	After upgrading to Strategic Planning v4.7.0, the following changes apply to user preferences: 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 Strategic Planning and Create a free-form roadmap view in Strategic Planning. Customizations made to the Timeline and Kanban views in the Roadmap tab, and the Kanban view in the Prioritization tab at the portfolio plan level, will be copied to the Default view of the portfolio plan. Similarly, any customizations made to the Timeline and Kanban views in the free-form roadmap will also be copied to the Default view of the free-form roadmap.
Zurich	After upgrading to Strategic Planning v4.8.0, the existing Investment type and Investment class fields will appear as Investment type (Deprecated) and Investment class (Deprecated) respectively across the Planning page including in the Prioritization and Roadmap views and in the Scenario Planning page. The values from these deprecated fields will be automatically copied to the new Investment type and Investment class fields. If you previously applied filters or personalized your view using the deprecated fields, you must update those configurations to use the new Investment type and Investment class fields across the workspace—including in the Prioritization and Roadmap views on the Planning page, as well as in the Scenario Planning page.

New features

Between your current release family and Zurich, new features were introduced for Strategic Planning.

Release	Release notes
Yokohama	Dashboards for data analysis and decision-making Use dashboards to view key data and metrics, enabling you to monitor performance, track progress, and make informed decisions related to ideas, feedback, planning, and execution. Dashboards consolidate data from multiple sources into a single, easily digestible format. Each widget within a dashboard displays key data and metrics and may include visualizations. The default dashboards include the Product Idea Dashboard, Feedback Dashboard, Strategy Execution Dashboard, and Execution Dashboard. You can create or edit dashboards, copy an existing dashboard and customize it as needed, and share dashboards to collaborate with business stakeholders who have access to the portfolio plan. Create and share views for portfolio plans and free-form roadmaps For portfolio plans - Create, edit, and switch between views with display preferences such as column selection, grouping, and filtering for portfolio plans. You can create personal views that are private to you, or public views that can be shared with stakeholders who have access to the portfolio plan. The portfolio plan view saves your display preferences across the Prioritization, Roadmap, Capacity, and Financials tabs. Note: Views are available only for the Planning module and are supported in live mode, but not in scenario mode. For free-form roadmaps - Create, edit, and switch between views with display preferences such as grouping, milestones selection, dependencies selection, and tracking mode for free-form roadmaps. You can create personal views that are private to you, or public views that can be shared with stakeholders who have access to the free-form roadmap. Write planning item skill Improve record quality and user satisfaction by enabling AI assistance in the Description field across all Strategic Planning Workspace forms, including product idea, demand, epic, project, capability, feature, and story. Enable text refinement with the Elaborate and Shorten options on planning items to support product managers and agile team members in creating and editing content more effectively. Plan efficiently with additional pre-defined lenses Using the Digital Product lens, portfolio managers can plan, prioritize, and roadmap the work in the Strategic Planning Workspace based on the digital products by aligning with the business strategy. The lens is supported with the work items, epic, and product idea. With the Digital Product lens, you can also do high-level planning using the Product Enhancement entity. By default, the Product Enhancement entity is enabled for high-level planning. Cycle time report for Agile teams in EAP dashboards Analyze how long the stories take for your Agile team to move from an in-progress state to completion. Each bubble on the chart represents a story and the chart shows stories completed in the past 30 days. You can compare the cycle times of stories that have different story points and review the trend in the time taken by the team to complete them. Using this data, identify the stories that took longer to complete and analyze the reasons so that you can draft an action plan to optimize the team's cycle time in the future. Kanban configuration for EAP teams Use the Kanban configuration for teams that don't prefer to work in an iteration-based schedule. You can activate the predefined Kanban configuration and add teams to your Agile structure or you can modify an existing configuration by setting the Planning calendar field to None. Column filters in EAP Backlog Quickly find the work items that you need by using column-level filters for the data on your EAP Backlog. You can filter on any column that is displayed on the Backlog tab. Generate stories from epics and features using Now Assist for EAP Break down epics and features into stories using the Now Assist Agile story generation skill in the EAP workspace. Using the available details such as name, description, docs content, and any existing stories, Now Assist provides story recommendations for your epic or feature. You can let Now Assist generate stories using its initial recommendations or you can choose to split or combine the story recommendations before prompting Now Assist to create the stories. View financial data of your planning items at portfolio level View the rolled-up financial costs and benefits data of your planning items such as Epics, Demands, and Projects at the portfolio level for different time scales and ranges. View the Budget, Planned, Variance, Actuals, and Remaining Estimates of the financials costs by expense type or cost type. View the Forecasts, Actuals, and Variance of monetary benefits. Create a manage financial scenarios of planning items Optimize your portfolio by creating financial scenarios to validate and arrive at a profitable outcome. Plan and manage the budget of planning items in 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 scenarios financially and automatically allocate the planned budget to planning items from approved scenarios. Enable the new budget allocation property (sn_invst_pln.enable_budget_allocation_v2) to perform financial analysis in scenario planning and take effective decisions by data-driven insights. Real-time collaboration for EAP Docs 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. The real-time collaboration feature for docs is also available for planning items in the Strategic Planning Workspace. See Docs for planning items. Note: To use the full functionality of Docs v6.6.0 within Strategic Planning Workspace, ensure that you upgrade Strategic Planning Workspace to v4.5.0. For more information, see KB2017926.
Zurich	Strategic Planning and AI Control Tower Categorize your strategic priorities, goals, planning items, and execution items—projects and demands as Artificial Intelligence to track and monitor strategy progress from the AI Control Tower workspace. Use the Type field for strategic priorities, the Category field for goals, the Investment type field for planning items - to classify them as Artificial Intelligence and monitor their progress in the AI Control Tower workspace. Integrate Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) with Atlassian Jira Facilitate execution of the work planned in EAP and executed in Jira. With this integration, enable seamless tracking of work across tools with bidirectional sync between Jira and EAP. Key updates made in one system, such as a status change or field update for Epics and Stories, will automatically reflect in the other. This integration ensures your team can collaborate and track development efforts without switching contexts, reducing manual effort and improving visibility across platforms. Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) integration with CWM Enhance visibility, planning, and execution for your teams with seamless integration between EAP and CWM. For Agile teams managing non-agile work items such as incidents and change tasks, this integration bridges the gap by automatically creating a dedicated Space and Board in CWM. Agile work is seamlessly brought over via Connected Work, while EAP sprints are reflected directly in CWM’s Sprint planning view, thus enabling unified planning across work types. Teams can plan work for their sprints and update work status directly from the CWM Board, with performance reports in EAP dynamically reflecting these changes. This integration enables teams to manage their full scope of work from a single, connected workspace. Dynamic data linking in Docs Keep record information in your documentation always current and reduce manual effort with the Dynamic data linking feature in Docs. You can now reference any ServiceNow application record and Docs will automatically reflect the latest updates from those records. For example, if you add a reference to a Project record, the reference will show the latest field information of the project in Docs without requiring manual edits. Clicking the project reference opens up the project form so that you can view the full details of the project record and make any necessary changes. Dynamic linking also enables adding references to a particular field of a record, such as Assigned to of an Incident record. You can add references from any ServiceNow table you have access to, with no setup or configuration needed, thereby eliminate the hassle of switching between applications to copy and paste data from various records into Docs. Portfolio plan enhancements Create portfolio plans for AI-related items by applying a filter on the planning item tables, setting the Investment type field value to Artificial Intelligence during portfolio plan creation. This allows you to focus exclusively on AI-related items. With the sn_align_core.apw_admin role, you can update the following system properties: sn_align_core.planning_item_types_allow_list - Defines the planning item types that can be configured and allowed for a portfolio plan. glide.ui.sn_align_core_dependency_activity.fields - Enables activity stream for the dependency formatter fields. sn_align_ws.gantt_show_higher_planning_upper_entities - Enables display of entire hierarchy of lens structure from top to bottom in prioritization hierarchy view for high-level portfolio plans. sn_align_ws.portfolio_plan_items_limit - Defines the number of planning items to be loaded on the planning page. Roadmap enhancements Create custom themes for your roadmap bar colors to align with your organization’s standards. Experience consistent roadmap bar colors for choice list attribute values across all portfolio plans. View the roadmap-level milestone row while scrolling down the Roadmap page. Use different icons to distinguish item-level milestones. Match milestone colors with their status labels across the roadmap, milestone popover, and side panel. For example, a missed milestone displays the same color in all locations. With the sn_align_core.apw_admin role, you can define the number of milestone items to be loaded in the Roadmap tab. The sn_align_ws.item_milestone_limit system property allows you to define the number of milestone items to be loaded in the Roadmap tab. With the sn_align_core.apw_admin role, you can define the list of planning item types that can be created in a free-form roadmap. The sn_align_ws.freeform_planning_items_creation_list system property allows you to define the list of planning item types that can be created in a free-form roadmap. Scenario planning enhancements With the sn_align_core.apw_admin role, you can enable or disable the scenario planning feature. The sn_align_ws.is_scenario_planning_disabled system property allows you to enable or disable the scenario planning feature. Quick filters enhancements Apply filters using string-type and boolean field values across the Planning page and Scoring page to view the required dataset. These filters are saved as part of your user preferences, enabling you to access the same filtered data when you log back in and continue your planning seamlessly. Investment type and Investment class fields on the Planning item table The Investment type and Investment class fields have been added to the Planning item [sn_align_core_planning_item] table to enable these attributes to be defined at the parent planning item level. A new value, Artificial Intelligence, has also been added to the Investment type field to categorize a planning item as an Artificial Intelligence initiative. Goal management enhancements With the sn_gf_goal_admin role, you can update goal-specific system properties: sn_align_ws.goal_hierarchy.max_records - Defines the number of targets to load on the Hierarchy tab in the Targets view. The default value is 250. glide.ui.sn_gf_goal_activity.fields - Enables activity stream for fields of the goals. Experience faster loading of goals data, even when large volumes of data are present. With the sn_gf.goal_admin role, you can edit any goal and target as needed, even when you aren’t the owner or contributor of a goal or target. With both the sn_gf_goal_admin and sn_apw_advanced.spw_goal_user roles, you can edit target breakdowns as needed. Financial enhancements View only the planned costs of your planning items to track the total cost of your planning items. Use Display mode to switch between focused views to better plan and track the financials of your planning items. Manage the planned and actual monetary benefit plans for your projects to identify the financial performance of your project using the Cost and benefits screen. Use multicurrency to view and manage financial records of the project in Investment currency, which can be different from your functional currency. Manage multiple financial records such as planned and actual expenses, planned and actual benefits, and so on. Generate and track labor cost for sub-projects, based on the resource assignments of your sub-projects and planning items such as features and capabilities.

Changes

Between your current release family and Zurich, some changes were made to existing Strategic Planning features.

Release	Release notes
Yokohama	Changes in planning item forms The dates in the Planned start date and Planned end date fields are editable for all planning item types other than Demand and Project planning item types. Also, the State field is editable for EAP planning items and its child items.
Zurich	Investment type and Investment class fields The Investment type and Investment class fields have been deprecated from the Project and Demand planning item tables. These fields are now created at the parent level in the Planning item [sn_align_core_planning_item] table. Goal management By default, only active goals—those goals with the Active field set to true—are displayed across the workspace. This change applies to the Dashboards and Goals and targets tabs on the Goals page, the Goal/Parent goal reference fields in all applicable tables, and all relevant dashboards. Default related list view changes for Stories In the Stories list for an Epic, Feature, or Capability in the Enterprise Agile Planning workspace, the Assignment group and Sprint columns in the default related list view are replaced with the EAP team and Iteration columns. Enhancements to tables in Docs Resize the column width of a table per your preference. Add color to single or multiple table cells.

Removed

Between your current release family and Zurich, some Strategic Planning features or functionality were removed.

Release	Release notes
Yokohama	No updates for this release.
Zurich	No updates for this release.

Deprecations

Between your current release family and Zurich, some Strategic Planning features or functionality were deprecated.

Release	Release notes
Yokohama	No updates for this release.
Zurich	The Investment class and Investment type fields have been deprecated from the Project [sn_align_core_project] and Demand [sn_align_core_demand] tables.

Activation information

Review information on how to activate Strategic Planning.

Release	Release notes
Yokohama	Install Strategic 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.
Zurich	Install Strategic Planning by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store.

Additional requirements

If any additional requirements were introduced or changed for Strategic Planning we have noted them here.

Release	Release notes
Yokohama	No updates for this release.
Zurich	No updates for this release.

Browser requirements

If any specific browser requirements were introduced or changed for Strategic Planning we have noted them here.

Release	Release notes
Yokohama	No updates for this release.
Zurich	No updates for this release.

Accessibility information

Review details on accessibility information for Strategic Planning, such as specific requirements or compliance levels.

Release	Release notes
Yokohama	No updates for this release.
Zurich	No updates for this release.

Localization information

If there are specific localization considerations for Strategic Planning we have noted them here.

Release	Release notes
Yokohama	No updates for this release.
Zurich	No updates for this release.

Highlight information

If there are specific highlight considerations for Strategic Planning we have noted them here.

Release	Release notes
Yokohama	Reduce time and effort by using story recommendations from Now Assist to break down your epics and features in Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP). Collaborate in real time on docs with multiple editors. View the rolled-up financial costs and benefits data of your planning items on the new Financials tab in the Planning page. View the financial data of planning items while creating multiple prioritization scenarios for efficient use of budget and to get better ROI. Use dashboards to monitor performance, track progress, and make informed decisions related to ideas, feedback, planning, and execution. Create, edit, and switch between views with display preferences for portfolio plans and free-form roadmaps. Enhance the quality of planning item descriptions by enabling AI assistance. See Strategic Planning for more information.
Zurich	Categorize your strategic priorities, goals, planning items, and execution items—projects and demands as Artificial Intelligence to track and monitor their progress from the AI Control Tower workspace. Experience consistent roadmap bar colors for choice list attribute values across all portfolio plans. View the roadmap-level milestone row while scrolling down the Roadmap page. Use different icons to distinguish item-level milestones. Apply filters using string-type and boolean field values to view the desired data on the Planning and Scoring pages. Work on financial planning for various planning items such as Capabilities, Features, and so on. View the planned costs of your planning items for the past fiscal periods. Use Display mode to switch between different views of the financials record page. Create and manage monetary benefit plans to capture and track projected and actual benefits. Manage and run projects in various global currencies besides the functional currency using multicurrency. Generate labor cost on sub-projects based on the resource assignments. See Strategic Planning for more information.