Alignment Planner Workspace release notes

  • Release version: Store
  • Updated June 11, 2026
  • 6 minutes to read
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    Summary of Alignment Planner Workspace release notes

    Alignment Planner Workspace (APW) is a comprehensive ServiceNow application designed to support IT Business Management (ITBM) planning roles in creating, managing, and sharing organizational roadmaps and plans. It integrates planning items, portfolios, demands, projects, and goals into a unified workspace with various lenses and views tailored to planning, prioritization, and financial tracking. APW evolves continuously with new features, performance improvements, and usability enhancements to streamline portfolio and demand management.

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    Key Features

    • Planning item lens: Enables direct planning, prioritization, and roadmapping of work without needing to configure complex organizational structures or portfolios (introduced in version 8.15.0).
    • Portfolio Planning enhancements: Support for expanding/collapsing views, sharing portfolio plans via links, and viewing additional status attributes such as cost, resource, schedule, and scope; automatic syncing of project status data.
    • Demand Workspace: Redesigned UI with AI-powered Playbook integration for streamlined demand management and visibility into agent activity.
    • Financial management: Multicurrency financial baselines and automatic labor cost calculations based on resource effort allocations.
    • Roadmap capabilities: Customizable color themes, improved visualizations, milestones management, dependencies tracking, and shareable ad hoc and free-form roadmaps.
    • Backlog and prioritization: Inline editing, rank visibility, grouping, and sorting to manage work pipelines efficiently.
    • Integration and data import: Support for importing work items from Azure DevOps and integration with Project Portfolio Management for milestone synchronization.
    • Role and permission management: New roles for value stream administration and enhanced access controls for portfolio plans and workspace functionalities.
    • User experience improvements: Modern UI, guided setup for admins, clickable URLs, and restored quick edit functionality.

    Fixes and Improvements

    • Resolved issues with filtering, roadmap rendering, permission leaks, and UI inconsistencies across multiple versions.
    • Fixed problems related to inactive users, incorrect demand type defaults, and update failures in resource scheduling.
    • Enhancements to component behavior such as retaining saved views after refresh and proper navigation within related lists.

    What ServiceNow Customers Can Expect

    ServiceNow customers leveraging Alignment Planner Workspace will benefit from a unified and flexible planning environment that supports strategic portfolio management, demand prioritization, and financial tracking within a modern, integrated interface. Continuous product updates ensure alignment with organizational standards through customizable features, improved data accuracy via synchronization and automation, and enhanced collaboration through shareable plans and controlled access. The application supports enterprise needs for managing complex portfolios and demands with AI assistance, role-based access, and seamless integration with development and project management tools.

    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 8.15.0 - 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.