Washington DC |
- Enterprise Agile Planning in Strategic Planning
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- Support multiple agile teams and their scaling needs within a single instance using flexible work and team hierarchies.
- Plan, visualize, and track work across teams with insights into dependencies using the Planning Board tab for each team.
- Prioritize work items and schedule them into iterations such as Planning Intervals or Sprints using the Backlog tab for each team.
- Upgrade your Agile configuration to align with the evolving needs of your organization.
- Get insights into team progress, velocity trends, and alignment of work to overall organizational goals using configurable dashboards.
- Feedback or Product idea list view enhancements
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- Use inline editing to allow real-time updates and modify feedback or product idea details.
- Edit multiple rows at once and eliminate the need to modify each record individually.
- Product feedback enhancements
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- Understand the popularity of feedback using Votes field and prioritize the feedback to make informed decisions. These votes are directly received from the idea portal.
- Identify and prioritize feedback with the Importance field on feedback records and make informed decisions based on the feedback.
- Create feedback filters in Strategic Planning
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- Group and sort feedback with feedback filters.
- As a product manager, create and organize product feedback based on filter criteria, and focus on feedback that is important to you.
- Plan efficiently with additional pre-defined lenses
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- Using the Business Capability lens, enterprise architects can plan, prioritize, and roadmap the work in the Strategic Planning Workspace based on the business capabilities and business applications by aligning with the strategy.
- Using the Project Program lens, program managers and portfolio managers can plan, prioritize, and roadmap work in programs.
- Tagging planning items
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- Add tags to your planning items to categorize them based on your requirement. Any tagging additions or removals made to a record are automatically synced across all views in the Planning page and the Scoring page.
- Filter the planning items by the assigned tags.
- Use inline editing in the List view of the Prioritization tab when adding and removing the tags to your planning items.
- Planning enhancements
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- Quickly view and manage the item details from the side panel using the Preview record icon (
![View item details icon.]() ) in the List view of the Prioritization tab and the Scoring page.
- The type of planning item is displayed on the item’s details page so that you can identify what the item is, such as a demand or a project.
- When creating a planning item, the Planned start date field and the Planned end date field are populated automatically with the Approved start date value and the Approved end date value respectively.
- Prioritization enhancements
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- Assign the highest and lowest ranks to the planning items using the Move to top option and the Move to bottom option respectively from the row context menu icon (
![Row context menu icon.]() ).
- Delete planning items using the Delete option from the row context menu icon (
![Row context menu icon.]() ).
- Goal management enhancements
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- Track how current and future work contribute to meeting a primary or non-primary target by associating the target with work items. When you create a primary goal or target relationship with an item that already has a
primary relationship, the existing association becomes a non-primary and a new primary relationship is created.
- Associate multiple planning items at a time to a goal or target from the enhanced Align work model, the item’s side panel, or the item’s full details page. You can also remove the existing association with the goal or
target from the side panel or full details page of the goal or target.
- View and manage an association between a planning item and a goal or target using the View aligned work option in the row context menu icon (
![Row context menu icon.]() ). The Aligned work tab introduced in an item’s side panel helps you add or remove an association between work items and a goal or target
- Search the aligned work items of the goal or target from the item’s side panel by the name, owner, or type of the work items.
- The list of goals and targets appear in the expanded mode by default in both the List view and the Hierarchy view so you can view all goals and targets in a hierarchical manner when accessing the page.
- The user preferences are saved automatically to retain the customizations, such as to view or hide columns and the width of the columns, so that you don’t need to set your preferences the next time you access the Goals
page.
- When creating a target, the Contributors field on the Target form is automatically populated with the contributors of its goal.
- Run the Create Goals Demo Data with Target Breakdowns scheduled job to create a target breakdowns demo data for the targets.
- For cumulative targets with the breakdown interval set to Quarterly and Yearly, the Target values are populated automatically for each quarterly and yearly breakdown respectively. For example, for a cumulative target created to achieve $10M in the year 2024, the target breakdowns Q1-24, Q2-24, Q3-24,
and Q4-24 are created with the Target values $2.5M, $5M, $7.5M, and $10M respectively.
- Financial planning for planning items
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- Customize widgets to view the financial details, such as allocated budget, EAC, Variance, a breakdown of planned costs, and actuals to date by cost type.
- Export Costs or Baseline comparison information as Microsoft Excel or CSV formats. Use these files to share the financial performance of your planning items to relevant business stakeholders, even if they don't have access to your ServiceNow instance.
- Create expense lines to capture any unplanned costs to meet your work requirements without associating them to any forecasted planned costs. For more information, see Add or edit expense lines.
- Delete any de-scoped cost plans using the row context menu icon (
![Row context menu icon.]() ) to manage your financials.
- Save your preferences to retain the customizations you have made, such as viewing or hiding columns and viewing time scope.
- Scoring enhancements
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- Apply filters on the Scoring page to view the required data set. These filters are saved as your preferences. This also helps you view the same data set and continue your planning when you log back in.
- When a demand is converted to a project, the score and rank of the item are automatically copied to the newly created project.
- Export data of portfolio plan items from Scoring or Prioritization
- Export data of your portfolio plan items from the Scoring page or the List view of the Prioritization tab into a Microsoft Excel or CSV file. Share the data and collaborate with your business stakeholders. If the filters are applied on the view, the filtered data is exported.
For more information, see Export planning items data from Scoring to Excel or CSV and Export data of portfolio plan items from Prioritization to Excel or CSV.
- Strategic Planning with PPM, Agile 2.0, and SAFe
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- The Program field has been added to all planning item tables and the Program and Portfolio fields have been added to the Epic [rm_epic] table to
support the Project Program lens.
- Enable the Sync tags option on the Table Map form for each planning item table to synchronize the tags from alignment to the execution tables and vice versa. By default, the value is set to true.
If there are any existing tags, the tags are automatically synced from alignment to the execution tables and vice versa. For more information about the Table Map form, see Table map form.
- The Flow type mapping for planned dates of the Demand [dmn_demand] table is updated to both alignment to execution and execution to alignment.
- Operation work in Capacity Planning
- Create operation resource assignments for your group and view the updated capacity in Capacity Planning view.
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Xanadu |
- Show or hide features for your portfolio plan
- As a portfolio manager, show or hide the features, such as Goals, Scoring, 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.
- Goal management enhancements
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- Create daily, weekly, or monthly target breakdowns according to how often you want to update and track the progress of the target. The target breakdowns are created based on the value selected in the Check-in
frequency field. For example, if you select Monthly in the Check-in frequency field for a target spanning a year, then 12 monthly target breakdowns are
created.
- Updating actuals for a target has been simplified with an enhanced UI:
- In the Check-in actuals window on the Progress tab of the target’s side panel, update the actual value of any time period or breakdown.
- In the Progress tab of the target’s side panel, view the trend of the target’s progress in a line or bar graph. You can also edit the planned target and view the check-in history of the target
actuals.
- When creating a target, the Target breakdown details section of the Target modal shows the planned target values for each target breakdown in a tabular format, which helps you visualize the final
target value spread across the target’s time period.
- On the Target form, use the Baseline reference field to compare future target performance with the actual value that was achieved in the last year or before the target was created.
- Add targets to a new goal using the Save and add target option on the Goal modal. Also, you can use the Save and add new target option to add more targets for the goal.
- Run the Create Goals Demo Data with Target Breakdowns scheduled job to create demo data with goals and target breakdowns. For more information on this scheduled job, see Create goals demo data with target breakdowns.
- Create a copy of a goal or target using the Duplicate option from the row context menu icon (
![Row context menu icon.]() ). For more information, see Create a copy of a goal or target.
- Activity stream is enabled for the targets and goals in the full details record page.
- Planning enhancements
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- Filter planning items in the Prioritization page and roadmap bars in the Roadmap page with multi-value fields, such as tags, business applications, and business capabilities.
- In the Child items related list of an EAP planning item, view child items associated with the epic in EAP.
- When you view a portfolio plan, 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.
- Now Assist in Strategic Planning
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- Generate a summary of selected text on Docs using the Planning item Gen AI Docs skill. You can summarize, elaborate, and shorten the selected content on Docs.
- Summarize a large volume of feedback using the multi feedback summarization skill on the Feedback page.
- Create a demand within the Employee Service Management (ESC) portal using the Now Assist conversational catalog creation capability.
- Summarize the complete content of a document with the Planning item Gen AI Docs skill to help save time on manual content analysis.
- Collaborate using Docs
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- Store the information of key artifacts and other details of planning items, such as Epics, Capabilities, and Features, directly from within the workspace.
- Manage team-level documentation for Agile team, ART, Solution Train, and Portfolio.
- Create multiple rich-text documents at each planning item level or Agile team level.
- Help avoid data loss and parallel editing with real-time collaboration.
- Tag team members to their action items.
- Insert media and URLs.
- Docs for planning items
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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.
- Migrate from SAFe
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Transition from Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) applications, such as Essential SAFe and Portfolio SAFe, to EAP. Use the Guided Setup module in the Strategic Planning application to execute your migration step by step.
This migration is intended to be one-time only. Initiating the migration again later while continuing to use SAFe applications with EAP won't carry any changes made to the SAFe records that are already migrated.
- Override the default planning calendar for Agile Teams
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For Agile Teams and Agile release trains (ARTs), the Override planning calendar field enables team members to change their planning calendar. The updated calendar is automatically applied to any child
teams and takes effect at the beginning of the next iteration.
- Persistence of personalization settings for the EAP PI planning board
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Personalization of the settings made in the PI planning board for a team type are applied across the workspace according to user, team type, and work item type. For example, settings applied to one ART, such as enabling the
Dependencies toggle, Team backlog lane, or compact cards, are applied to all ARTs in the workspace for a user.
- 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 the differences between goal alignment and 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 goals and targets data to Excel or CSV
- Export goals and targets from your portfolio plan into a Microsoft Excel or CSV file to share the data and collaborate with your business stakeholders.
- 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. Score and prioritize the programs and track them using roadmaps.
- Feedback enhancements
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- Manage the feedback filter card directly from the feedback homepage by sorting, pinning, sharing, updating, or deleting it.
- Allow access to specific users or groups when sharing the feedback filter card, and review the users who have access to it.
- Financials in Strategic Planning
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- Migrate the existing planning items budget 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 budget.
- 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.
- Capacity Planning in Strategic Planning
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- Select a primary attribute to auto-select the resource criteria based on the planning items in the portfolio.
- Automatically generate resource capacity using a scheduled job at your desired cadence.
- View only prioritized planning items in the bottom tray of the Capacity Planning screen.
- View the total capacity, estimate, and available efforts of a resource using the heatmap view.
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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
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- 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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- 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
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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 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
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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.
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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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.
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