Exploring Portfolio Planning in Strategic Planning

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 3 minutes to read

    • Learn about the features, functionality, and the business value that Strategic Planning provides.

    Strategic Planning overview

    Strategic Planning uses Lenses to help you plan work for your company in a delivery perspective of your choice. Personalized portfolio plans that are created using a lens help you cascade the plans from the enterprise level down through portfolios and products or align work with an organizational goal or a value stream. Prioritize and roadmap relevant work, thus aligning the right execution teams to the right strategy.

    After strategic plans are broken down into planning items such as projects or epics, you can schedule these items into your product or portfolio roadmaps. Using hybrid roadmaps, you can roll up both Waterfall and Agile work items to a shared initiative. You can also plan capacity and financials for each of these planning items all from a single workspace.

    From the following table, learn about features of Strategic Planning in detail and how they enable managers to draw effective plans and drive agile transformation across the company.

    Features and Benefits

    Feature Benefit
    Lens

    Choose a planning perspective to prioritize, fund, and align your work.
    Lens configuration Use six predefined lenses or create custom lenses.
    Portfolio plans Enable focused planning of work in the desired lens to align with strategy and drive shared outcomes.
    High-level portfolio plans Prioritize and roadmap work at a high-level by building portfolio plans for strategic items such as initiatives.
    Planning items Plan work in the form of projects, epics, demands, or a custom type to suit traditional, Agile, or hybrid approaches.
    Prioritization

    Facilitate smoother backlog grooming and prioritize the right work using List, Kanban, and Hierarchy views.
    Portfolio roadmaps

    Visualize the prioritized work into roadmaps and set milestones to track key outcomes.
    Free-form roadmaps

    Flexibly plan and track work across the company, without restricting to a planning organization or portfolio.
    Scenario planning Optimize your portfolio planning by comparing potential outcomes, assessing their alignment with strategic goals, and approving the best scenario as your live plan.
    Scoring Start scoring items in your portfolio plan to prioritize work based on a pre-defined or a custom score.
    Goal management Create goals for portfolio plans, set targets for them, and evaluate the progress of the goals and targets to accomplish your organizational plans and drive business outcomes.
    Diagnostics Identify and fix errors in the configuration and other common settings.
    Capacity Planning Generate, view, and better plan the resource capacity for your prioritized planning items.
    Financial planning View the financial planning of your planning items using the comprehensive view in the new Financials screen.

    Comparing Portfolio Planning Workspace with Strategic Planning Workspace

    • Portfolio Planning Workspace: Prioritize, roadmap, and track work when using waterfall methodology. Enhance traditional portfolio planning for demand and project management. To learn more about Portfolio Planning, see Portfolio Planning.
    • Strategic Planning Workspace: Prioritize, roadmap, and track work when using traditional, agile, or hybrid methodologies. Align strategy to execution by defining and tracking goals across the organization.
    Feature Portfolio Planning Workspace Strategic Planning Workspace
    Pre-defined lens: Project Portfolio Yes Yes
    Pre-defined lens: Organization Yes Yes
    Pre-defined lens: Project Program Yes Yes
    Pre-defined lens: Product No Yes
    Pre-defined lens: Strategic Investments No Yes
    Pre-defined lens: Goals No Yes
    Pre-defined lens: Value Stream No Yes
    Pre-defined lens: Business Capability No Yes
    Lens configuration: Modify existing lens Yes Yes
    Lens configuration: Create new lens No Yes
    Portfolio plans: Create and share Yes Yes
    Planning items: Supported planning items Project, Demand Project, Demand, Epic, Custom
    Planning items: Supported planning items for high-level planning Program (pm_program) Strategic Program, Initiative, Custom
    Planning items: Custom planning item tables No Five predefined tables
    Prioritization: List Yes Yes
    Prioritization: Hierarchy Yes Yes
    Prioritization: Kanban No Yes
    Roadmaps: Timeline Yes Yes
    Roadmaps: Kanban No Yes
    Scenario planning Yes Yes
    Scoring No Yes
    Goals No Yes
    Product Feedback No Yes
    Capacity planning Yes Yes
    Financials Yes Yes
    Create and share free-form roadmaps Project, Demand, and Program tables Any ServiceNow® platform entity
    Enterprise Agile Planning No Yes