Goal form

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Goal form

    The Goal form in ServiceNow's Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) enables you to create and manage goals aligned with your organization's strategic priorities. This form is essential for organizing, tracking, and reporting on goals across various organizational levels and categories. It supports detailed input and progress tracking to ensure goals contribute effectively to strategic outcomes.

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    Key Features

    • Goal Details: Define the goal’s name, description, and select its category from options such as Total Applications, Cost, Compliance, and AI. Assign a state (e.g., Draft, In Progress, Achieved) and status (Red, Yellow, Green, None) to reflect its current condition.
    • Progress Tracking: Automatic calculation of goal progress based on sub-goals and targets, helping you monitor completion percentage accurately.
    • Parent Information: Link goals to strategic priorities or parent goals and assign an impact value to indicate the relative importance of the goal among siblings. This impact feature is configurable via the system property sngf.weightedaverageenabled.
    • Ownership and Responsibility: Assign the goal to an entity type (e.g., Business Unit, Department) and specific entity (e.g., HR, IT). Designate an owner and contributors to clarify accountability and collaboration.
    • Duration Management: Set start and end dates for goals, with defaults aligned to the current quarter or inherited from parent goals for sub-goals.
    • Additional Collaboration Features: Use comments for detailed notes and assign teams responsible for activities. For Operational Sustainability Workspace users, classify goals under Environmental, Social, or Governance categories.
    • Form Configuration: For users of Operational Sustainability Workspace and Strategic Planning, additional fields beyond the default view can be configured through form layout settings.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    • Enables structured goal creation aligned with organizational strategic priorities, improving clarity and focus.
    • Facilitates progress monitoring and accountability through state, status, ownership, and impact assignment.
    • Supports hierarchical goal management by linking sub-goals to parent goals and strategic priorities.
    • Enhances collaboration with contributor roles, detailed comments, and team assignments.
    • Allows customization of form views to match user roles and workspace requirements, ensuring relevant information is accessible.

    Use the Goal form to create goals for your organizational strategic priorities.

    Note:
    For Operational Sustainability Workspace and Strategic Planning users, to view the other fields (that are not added to the default or your custom form view) on the form in the workspace, configure the default/custom form layout. For information on how to configure the form layout, see Configuring the form layout.
    Table 1. Goal form
    Field Description
    Name Name of the goal.
    State State of the goal. The state can be Draft, In progress, Approved, Complete, Pending, Achieved, Not Achieved, or Cancelled.
    Category Category of the goal. The available options are:
    • Total Applications
    • Total Cost
    • Opex
    • Capex
    • Cloud Applications
    • Homegrown Applications
    • Support Cost
    • Labor Cost
    • Standards Compliance
    • Strategic
    • Operational
    • Tactical
    • Artificial Intelligence
    Status Status of the goal. Status can be Red, Yellow, Green, or None.
    Progress Percentage complete for the goal. The progress value is calculated automatically if the goal has sub-goals or/and targets.

    For more information on how the progress value is calculated, see Progress value calculation.
    Description Brief description of the goal.

    You can refine goal description using the Refine records skill, if the Now Assist for SPM application is installed.
    Table 2. Parent information section of the Goal form
    Field Description
    Strategic priority Name of the strategic priority that this goal is created for.
    Parent goal Name of the parent goal that this goal contributes to.
    Impact on parent goal A numerical value that represents the importance of this goal relative to sibling goals or other goals under its parent goal. By default, the value is (1) Neutral.
    The available options are:
    • (0) No impact
    • (1) Neutral
    • (2) Moderate
    • (3) High
    • (4) Very high
    • (5) Maximum
    Note:
    This field is available only when the sn_gf.weighted_average_enabled system property is set to Yes.
    Table 3. Owners & Contributors section of the Goal form
    FIeld Description
    Assigned entity type Entity type to which the goal is assigned. For example, Business Unit, Department, Company, or Portfolio.
    Assigned entity Entity to which the goal is assigned. For example,if the portfolio plan is created with Business Units, HR and IT, populate the Assigned entity type as Business Unit and Assigned entity type as HR or IT.
    Note:
    Populating the Assigned entity type and Assigned entity fields are required to display the goals in the portfolio plan.
    Owner Owner of the goal. By default, the name of the user creating the goal is populated.
    Contributors Users who contribute to the achievement of the goal.
    Table 4. Duration section of the Goal form
    Field Description
    Start date Start date for the goal. By default, the start date of the current quarter is populated. For a sub-goal, start date of its parent goal is populated.
    End date End date for the goal. By default, the end date of the current quarter is populated. For a sub-goal, the end date of its parent goal is populated.
    Table 5. Other section of the Goal form
    Field Description
    Comments Detailed comments for the goal to facilitate collaboration.
    Team Assignment group responsible for different activities in achieving the goal.
    Classification Goal classification type. The available options are Environmental, Social, and Governance. This field is applicable only for the Operational Sustainability Workspace users.