Portfolio Planning release notes
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 Xanadu release.
Portfolio Planning highlights for the Xanadu release
- Show or hide the features of your portfolio plan so you share only the most important data with your stakeholders.
- Filter the planning items and roadmap bars with multivalue fields, such as tags, business applications, and business capabilities.
- Create scenarios to simulate changes to the portfolio plan, compare scenarios for visualizing trade-off decisions, and approve a scenario to revise the live plan.
- Prioritize and roadmap the program [pm_program] items for your organization at a high level by building portfolio plans using the Project Program lens.
- Migrate the budget of your planning items to Next Experience, and as a portfolio manager, compare, allocate, manage, and approve the budget.
- View the cost plans, expense lines, budget, and financial baselines of sub-projects at the parent project level. View the financial performance of a project using the rolled-up planned and actuals costs in the widgets of parent projects.
- Select a primary attribute to populate resource criteria automatically from the resource assignments of the prioritized planning items, and view the team's capacity in the Capacity Planning screen.
See Portfolio Planning for more information.
Important:
Portfolio Planning is available in the ServiceNow Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.
New in the Xanadu release
- Show or hide features for your portfolio plan
- As a portfolio manager, show or hide the features, such as Prioritization and Roadmap, of your portfolio plan. This capability helps you share only the portfolio plan data that matters to your stakeholders and restrict access to the other data.
- Planning enhancements
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- Filter planning items in the Prioritization page and roadmap bars in the Roadmap page with multivalue fields, such as tags, business applications, and business capabilities.
- As a portfolio plan viewer, you can copy a portfolio plan that you don't have edit access to and edit the plan as needed. For more information, see Copy a portfolio plan.
- Optimize planning using scenario planning
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- Create scenarios in a simulated environment and adjust the prioritization and timelines of planning items.
- Check the alignment of planning items with goals to verify the delivery of strategic outcomes.
- Visualize trade-off decisions between scenarios by comparing scenarios side by side.
- Approve the best scenario as the live portfolio plan for execution and making informed decisions.
- Export a roadmap or free-form roadmap to PowerPoint
- Export a roadmap or free-form roadmap from a portfolio plan into a Microsoft PowerPoint file to share data and collaborate with your business stakeholders. The predefined template helps you generate reports for your roadmap, including roadmap milestones, item milestones,
vertical lines, and horizontal lanes.
You can export a roadmap for the maximum tenure of lanes a year at a time. You can also choose between Compact mode, which exports 25 horizontal lanes per slide, or Default mode, which exports 15 horizontal lanes per slide, when exporting your roadmap.
You can select the data that you want to be exported into the report by editing the predefined templates or creating your own branded template. For more information, see Create a Microsoft PowerPoint template.
- Plan at a high level using the Project Program lens
- Plan at a high level by building portfolio plans for program [pm_program] items using the Project Program lens. Prioritize the programs and track them using roadmaps.
- Docs for planning items in Portfolio Planning
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- Store the information of key artifacts and other details of planning items, such as Demands, Projects, and Epics, directly from within the workspace.
- Create multiple rich-text documents at each planning item level.
- Help avoid data loss and parallel editing with real-time collaboration.
- Tag team members to their action items.
- Insert media and URLs.
- Financials in Portfolio Planning
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- Migrate the existing budget for planning items from the classic UI to Next Experience using the Migrate Budget option.
- As a portfolio manager, allocate and manage the budget of your planning items using the Budget vs cost view.
- As a project manager, compare a budget to the captured costs of your planning items and reforecast the planned costs to meet the approved budget.
- Compare financial baselines to view simple financials and budgets.
- View the cost plans, expense lines, and financial baselines of sub-projects using the Financial view of a parent project.
- Widgets in the Cost view of parent projects display the rolled-up value of the planned costs, expense lines, budget, and variance.
- Create custom labor cost types and map them with a unique sys_id to generate labor costs.
UI changes
- Planning UI changes
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- The Copy portfolio plan option in the Portfolio actions menu has been renamed to Duplicate portfolio plan.
- The Create copy option in the Row context menu of planning items has been renamed to Duplicate.
- Roadmap UI changes
- The Copy roadmap option in the Roadmap actions menu has been renamed to Duplicate roadmap.
- Financials UI changes
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- New Budget vs. cost toggle for project managers and product managers to view a comparison of budget and captured costs.
- New Budget allocation toggle for portfolio managers to manage the project budget.
- New Approve budget button in the budget allocation view for portfolio managers to approve budget changes.
- New grid view to enter and view the budget information at a fiscal period, quarterly, or yearly, and the total breakdowns by Expense Type or Cost Type.
- New Project/Demand column in the Cost view to show the mapping of cost plans to projects and sub-projects.
- Capacity Planning UI changes
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- New Resource criteria screen.
- New Auto-select and Manual-select options to select the attributes on the Resource criteria screen.
- New Prioritized Work Item category in the bottom tray of the Capacity Planning screen.
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.