Portfolio plans in Strategic Planning

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Portfolio plans in Strategic Planning

    Portfolio plans are tailored plans created by planning managers to align work with organizational objectives. These plans utilize different lenses, allowing managers to define goals, set targets, and roadmap work effectively. By employing specific perspectives, such as Strategic Investment or Organization, managers can ensure alignment between goals and work across various departments.

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    Key Features

    • Customizable portfolio plans for focused work planning.
    • Ability to visualize and share plans and progress with stakeholders.
    • High-level planning capabilities for strategic items such as initiatives, strategic programs, and product enhancements.
    • Hierarchy view to drill down into lower-level planning items associated with strategic initiatives.
    • Collaboration across departments for large-scale efforts aimed at long-term goals.

    Key Outcomes

    By utilizing portfolio plans, organizations can:

    • Prioritize work in alignment with business strategy.
    • Reduce time spent aligning execution teams with the right tasks.
    • Enable high-level planning across multiple business units and departments.
    • Create a sustainable competitive advantage through well-defined initiatives.

    For effective implementation, ensure the required lens setup and collaborate with your ServiceNow administrator for any necessary configurations.

    Personalized portfolio plans help you align work with your company's objectives and roadmap the right work for the right time. Drive shared strategy using planning insights from portfolio plans and improve enterprise planning.

    Portfolio plans overview

    Portfolio plans are custom plans per planning manager that are built using a lens. They enable planning managers to define goals, set targets for these goals, and then roadmap the work to ensure alignment between goals and the planned work.

    A strategy leader using the Strategic Investment lens plans in the perspective of initiatives, and a department head using the Organization lens plans in the perspective of a department.

    As a planning manager, you can create multiple portfolio plans using different lenses. Visualize the plans and progress of work from different perspectives and share them with stakeholders.

    Using portfolio plans, you can:
    • Enable focused planning of work in the desired perspective (lens).
    • Prioritize the right work and improve alignment with business strategy.
    • Reduce the time spent on aligning execution teams to the right work.

    High-level planning using portfolio plans

    In Strategic Planning, you can roadmap work for your organization at a high level by building portfolio plans for strategic items such as initiatives. High-level planning items usually span across multiple business units, departments, or portfolios of a company. These strategic work items help you further breakdown a company's priorities.
    • Initiative: Used to achieve long-term goals. Initiatives are designed to create a sustainable competitive advantage for the organization. They often involve large-scale effort that requires coordination and collaboration across multiple departments or business units.
    • Strategic Program: Used to achieve specific milestones and outcomes of an Initiative.
    • Program (pm_program): Used to achieve milestones and outcomes of a program.
    • Product Enhancement: Used to plan and achieve feature enhancements for digital products.

    Using the Hierarchy view, review the work pipeline and drill down to the low level planning items that are associated to your strategic item.

    For example, as an EPMO, you can view the epics associated to each initiative. Also, you can view and manage the goals that these initiatives are aligned to.

    By default, you can use Initiatives or Strategic Programs from the Strategic Investments lens or Programs (pm_program) from the Project Program lens to create high-level portfolio plans. See Create a high-level portfolio plan.

    If you need high-level planning enabled for planning items other than Initiatives, Strategic Programs, Programs (pm_program), work with your ServiceNow admin to complete the additional configuration. See High-level planning configuration in Strategic Planning.

    Here's a sample portfolio plan that shows a few strategic programs of the company and the low-level work (projects and demands) that are aligned with them.High-level portfolio plan hierarchy view.

    Work with your administrator to ensure the required lens setup. See Lens configuration in Strategic Planning.

    Start creating portfolio plans to align work with strategy. See Managing portfolio plans in Strategic Planning.