Dear Community members,

I'm back with my new article on - Step by Step guide to configure Alignment Planner Workspace (APW)

We often notice project fail or do not achieve expected business outcome, because of poor planning & Lack of proper tools. APW helps you to align, plan & deliver expected business outcome.

key APW terms:

Planning hierarchy : A Configurable framework of levels used to organize business process.

Planning nodes : Node defined at each level of Planning hierarchy

Planning organizations : Planning organizations are responsible for planning activities at distinct levels in your organization—enterprise, portfolios, business units, departments, or divisions.

Planning items : Planning item refers to the type of work item that different planning organizations use

Conceptual representation of APW terms:

• Items marked in Red are Planning hierarchy
• Items marked in Green are Planning nodes
• Items marked in Blue are Planning organizations
• Items marked in Black are Planning items

Planning Hierarchy in detail:

Below is screenshot from ServiceNow, shows simple structure of Planning hierarchy you get in out of box with APM.

Understanding APW terms on ServiceNow UI

Lets understand Where you can locate Planning items, organizations, Hierarchies in ServiceNow UI

Planning hierarchy and Planning Nodes

Planning organisations

Understanding APW terms on workspace

Lets understand Where you can locate Planning items, organizations, Hierarchies in ServiceNow Workspace UI

Core Setup :

• Install Plugins : Install following APW plugins (Please ensure PPM & Agile 2.0/Safe plugins are already installed)
  
  • Alignment Planner workspace (Id:sn_align_ws)
    
  • Alignment Planner Workspace integrations for PPM and Agile 2.0 (Id:sn_align_snow_int)

• Define Goals : Executive leader define goals which indicates vision. Leader can define goals at "Goal Framework" and set targets against each goal to ensure you able to track timely accomplishments of goals. Goals can be defined at
  
  • Navigate to Enterprise Goal Management > Goals
    
  • You can also migrate the existing goals data to the Goal Framework tables by running the scheduled job.
    
    • Navigate to .
      
    • Search for and click the "Migrating Goal, Strategy, and related Work Item data to the new tables scheduled job"
      
    • Execute the job

• Define planning hierarchy: Here you have two options - Either choose existing templates to create planning hierarchy or create custom planning hierarchy based on customer requirements.
  
  • If you want to use existing templates to create planning hierarchy then you can simple go to
    
    • Navigate to
      
    • 

• Define planning items: After planning hierarchy, you need to define planning items.
  
  • If your using out of box planning hierarchy, then most of plannings items is already defined in servicenow
    
    • However if your creating custom planning hierarchy, then in that case you can either use exisiting out of box planning items or create custom planning items
      
• Define planning organisations: Now its time to define Planning organisations

and there your done!

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Key Roles :

Executive Leader - To setup and define goals

Product/portfolio Manager - To align goal to product/portfolio, Create initiatives

Demand Manager - Break initiatives in to small work items - projects/demands/epics/features, capture scope, cost, resource for better execution

Development team - APW is just "FYI" for the developers to know how tehir work is directly impacting and helping organisation to achieve goals

Tables Structure :

Thank you!

Rajesh Singh