What’s new in the Tokyo release for Strategic Portfolio Management?

[ServiceNow]

by Newsha Sharif

We are so excited to share all the new innovations in Strategic Portfolio Management for the Tokyo release. 

We already know organizations are being asked to deliver value faster while managing change in this disruptive market. According to Gartner, “organizations that expose the dependencies between work and strategic goals significantly increase the likelihood of achieving strategic portfolio management.”  

ServiceNow’s Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) provides leaders the ability to translate strategy into outcomes that drive business value. It enables organizations to prioritize and fund what matters most, build a roadmap to strategize investments, communicate plans, and track progress. It also empowers teams to plan and deliver work using any methodology: traditional (waterfall), Agile, or hybrid.  

With the new innovations in the Tokyo release, our customers are even more empowered to align all work to deliver more value. This release helps customers effectively prioritize work based on organizational strategy and improve usability across the solution.

We're enhancing the Alignment Planner Workspace, or APW, and adding other new capabilities to our solution, such as the ability to export status reports to PowerPoint and surface key financial metrics to drive strategic outcomes. Below are our latest enhancements and innovations:

Alignment Planner Workspace enhancements – You’ve all been familiar with Alignment Planner Workspace by now. We introduced it a year ago and we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback and innovating this tool to accommodate our customer’s needs. Just to remind everyone. ServiceNow’s Alignment Planner Workspace (APW) provides an end-to-end integrated planning experience that aligns strategy to execution and supports better decisions at every level of the organization. APW is a single, actionable workspace where Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO) and business leaders can define goals and targets and cascade them across the organization; gather, review, and prioritize initiatives and work items that align with the strategy and commit to them once they are on the roadmap all in a single platform. 

In the May store release and now as part of the Tokyo release we’ve enhanced APW to include the Goal Framework feature that allows portfolio managers and business leaders to enter objectives and key results (OKRs) then cascade them across the organization. Goal Framework targets the strategy level to ensure that meaningful outcomes can be efficiently delivered. 

We are also adding a Portfolio Backlog feature, which enables planners to consolidate, review, and prioritize initiatives before strategically committing them to the roadmap. Managing and tacking backlogs of work from different groups can be difficult, so it is key that planners have a single source of all backlogs to have adequate visibility.  

Lastly, customers can now add dependencies to visualize relationships between planning items. Conflicts between tasks will be flagged so customers are aware of incomplete tasks hindering the start or completion of another. This ensures that work flows properly across portfolios as conflicts between tasks can be quickly resolved. I find this feature very valuable in my project planning as I always have projects that depend on other team’s deliverables. And since we can visually see the dependencies, we can all agree on the timing and how we can all plan better to deliver our projects on time.  

 

Figure 1: Align work with strategy to deliver business outcomes 

Export to PowerPoint –We know PowerPoint has been a tool of choice for years, for communicating key insights to enable leaders to make key decisions. One of the important tasks of project managers is to communicate status reports and PowerPoint serve this purpose.  However converting status report to PowerPoint could be time consuming and error prone. Now with this new feature projects managers can now easily convert their status reports into branded PowerPoint slides for ease of communication with stakeholders. Line and bar charts can also be generated with a single click to better visualize data. And they can personalize it by changing the colors and fonts to accommodate their preference or their branding guidelines.  Exporting reports to PowerPoint saves teams valuable time each week.  

 

Figure 2: Generate custom status reports quickly for ease of communication and alignment 

Financial metrics – Tracking financial metrics can be tedious and time consuming for project managers when they need to check multiple pages to understand budget, planned cost, actual cost, and other factors. We offer a new overview page that consolidates real-time key financial metrics by fiscal period, month, quarter, and year. This enables project managers to confidently reforecast project costs if changes arise, making their work both easier and quicker.  

Figure 3: Access consolidated financials to reforecast faster and with confidence  

With organizations juggling many key factors for growing amounts of work, it is vital that portfolio managers, business leaders and project managers have visibility for relevant tasks and metrics. The SPM solution enables organizations to better deliver strategic outcomes by aligning work to strategy. If you are interested in learning more and see the new innovations in action, please sign up here as we deliver our Tokyo release broadcast.   

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