Portfolio Planning release notes
Summarize
Summary of Portfolio Planning Release Notes
The ServiceNow® Portfolio Planning application has been enhanced in the Zurich release, allowing customers to visualize and align their work with organizational objectives effectively. This update includes various improvements aimed at enhancing financial tracking, project management, and user experience.
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Key Features
- Financial Tracking Enhancements: View planned costs for past fiscal periods and utilize a new Display mode for better financial overview.
- Roadmap Improvements: Create custom themes for roadmap bar colors and distinguish milestones with different icons. View roadmap-level milestones while scrolling.
- Dynamic Data Linking: Automatically update documentation with the latest information from ServiceNow records, reducing manual effort.
- Scenario Planning: Enable or disable the scenario planning feature using specific roles and properties.
- Quick Filters: Save filters for string-type and Boolean values to streamline data access across sessions.
- UI Changes: The Coral theme is now the default for a modern user experience, with a dark theme option available.
Key Outcomes
With these enhancements, ServiceNow customers can expect streamlined financial management, improved project oversight, and a more cohesive user experience. The ability to manage various currencies and generate labor costs based on resource assignments will further support effective project planning and execution. To activate Portfolio Planning, customers can request it through the ServiceNow Store.
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 Zurich release.
Portfolio Planning highlights for the Zurich release
- View the planned costs of your planning items for the past fiscal periods.
- Use Display mode to switch between different views of the financials record page.
- 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.
- Apply filters using string-type and Boolean field values to view the desired data.
- Customize and apply a theme to your roadmap to match your organization’s standards.
- Create and manage monetary benefit plans to capture and track projected and actual benefits.
- Manage and run projects in various global currencies besides the functional currency using multicurrency.
- Generate labor cost on sub-projects based on the resource assignments.
See Portfolio Planning for more information.
New in the Zurich release
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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.
- Financial enhancements
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- View only the planned costs of your planning items to track the total cost of projects or demands.
- 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.
UI changes
- Coral theme
- Coral is now the default theme for new portal, web, and mobile experiences with Next Experience or Core UI enabled. This theme provides a fresh look and feel, featuring brand-neutral illustrations to enhance your user experience. A dark theme option is available for web and mobile experiences.
- Financials in Portfolio Planning
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- Use the new Display mode in the Financials record page to select and view forecast, compare planned vs actual costs, planned costs, or allocate budget.
- Renamed Cost tab as Costs and benefits to manage cost plans and benefit plans in one view.
- Renamed Baselines as Baseline comparison to create and compare financial baselines.
- Renamed Time scope as Filter time scope to adjust the time scope to view a focused and customized financial snapshot.
- New Generate labor costs button to generate labor costs based on the resource assignments.
- New Currency list option to switch between functional and investment currency.
- New Edit investment currency option to define investment currency for your projects.
- New monetary benefit plan option to create new forecast benefit plans.
- New Planned Benefits widget displays the total forecasted benefits.
- New Total Return widget displays the total actual benefits form the projects.
- New Record type column to classify the financial records between benefits and costs.
- Renamed Estimate At Completion widget to EAC Cost.
- Renamed Actual Cost To Date to Actuals (Incl. current fiscal period).
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.