The Vancouver release of the Strategic Portfolio Management solution introduces new applications as well as several enhancements that will support: gathering customer feedback, improving tracking strategic goals and user experience across the management of resources, capacity planning and financial management.
Building on the improvements to the Goal Framework, Strategic Planning and Portfolio Lenses from previous releases, the Vancouver release introduces a new application – Data Separation that enables the restriction of data in SPM based on the Lens hierarchy, providing greater control.
A new process mining content pack for demands helps with identifying bottlenecks in the demand management process and brings opportunities for performance improvements.
Data Separation
Back in February, ServiceNow Utah release introduced 6 Portfolio Lenses in the Strategic Planning tool that help with planning work from various perspectives (e.g. Portfolio, Organization, Strategic Investments, Product, Value Stream, Goals). In the Vancouver release, the new application Data Separation helps organisations to restrict sensitive data based on the previously introduced lenses and their hierarchy, giving control to the organisation to limit which group of users can access selected:
- entities,
- records,
- related items,
- planning consoles,
- workbenches,
- and reports.
An example use case could be a need to restrict access to projects, demands and some of their related entities based on the business unit. Data Separation tool supports the following entities:
- Demand
- Project
- Resource Plan
- Cost Plan
- Cost Plan Breakdown
- Project Tasks
Product Feedback
Customer feedback can help you identify improvements in your products. If you are struggling to keep track of customer feedback from various sources such as emails, chats, and meetings, Strategic Portfolio application’s Product Feedback feature can help. It allows product managers to gather, store, and organise feedback from multiple sources, including Outlook emails using the Product Feedback Outlook Add-in. Feedback can be linked to product ideas and directly turned into planning items. Moreover, Product Feedback dashboard offers Product managers insights into trends and a view of statistics that help them make informed decisions about potential product enhancements.
Capacity Planning extension to Strategic Planning Workspace
The Strategic Planning Workspace’s feature – Capacity Planning, allows organisations to determine whether they have sufficient resources to complete the work required for planning items. Additionally, it is possible to create new Resource Assignments for Agile entities, such as Agile/SAFe epics. For the selected portfolio, Portfolio managers have the ability to specify the resource criteria, such as skills, roles or groups, that should be taken into account when performing capacity planning. This is a great enhancement to Strategic Planning Workspace.
The new Manage Capacity provides a complete view of the capacity of the resources (by selecting group, skills or role) for a specific period of time, regardless of their current work assignment.
Goal Framework extension to Strategic Planning Workspace
Goal Dashboard provides users with insights into the status and progress of various portfolio goals. Enhanced features include smart filters that reflect the entities in the portfolio, allowing you to:
- find goals that are not aligned with parent goals,
- track the progress of all targets within a portfolio,
- view goals by strategic priority.
The Goals List View has also been improved by:
- adding an option to set new targets and manage/edit them from the side panel,
- adding remarks,
- personalising the layout with the ability to choose which time periods to display,
- editing actuals,
- and viewing parent entity goals.
Financial Planning extension to Strategic Planning Workspace
Financial Planning in Strategic Planning Workspace / Planning Workspace brings an intuitive user interface for the financial management of Planning Items and Agile Entities. Project managers can generate labour costs for Projects, Demands, Epics, SAFe Epics and non-labour costs, manually input cost plans, and add expenses for fiscal periods – all in one place.
Resource Management extension to Project Workspace
The new enhanced user experience for the Project Workspace brings features that improve the management of resources for your projects. Additionally, there are new behaviour enhancements in regard to synchronizing project dates with Resource Management. It can happen that there is a change in the project schedule and the set dates are no longer valid and must be updated. The new feature Resource not synced notifies you about the inconsistency in dates and allows you to synchronise them. Using Realign assignments to task action, you can synchronise the resource assignments dates with the project task or child task dates. This way you can reduce the manual effort required to update each of the resource assignments.
Conclusion
ServiceNow SPM Vancouver release continues to improve the key applications and features, including Goal Framework, Strategic Planning Workspace, Portfolio Planning Workspace and Project Workspace, in order to provide more value and efficiency in terms of user experience.
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