Get ready to transform your strategic planning and day-to-day collaboration. ServiceNow’s latest Zurich release is packed with new features for Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) and Collaborative Work Management (CWM). These updates aren’t just technical improvements; they’re designed to help you work smarter, make more confident decisions, and connect your teams like never before. From AI-powered insights to seamless collaboration tools, this release is all about bringing strategy and execution closer.
Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)
New ways to manage AI and financials
With the new AI Strategy in AI Control Tower, you can finally get a single pane of glass to govern and monitor your entire AI portfolio. Leaders can instantly see AI-related goals, projects, and risks, ensuring your AI investments are always aligned with your business strategy.
Don’t wait until a project is underway to track costs. Financials on Planning Items allows you to apply rate models and track expenses for early-stage items, such as epics or other planning item types. This provides better financial forecasting and supports lean budgeting from the outset, enabling you to make smarter decisions sooner.
Moreover, the new display modes in Financials allow you to switch views to match your organisation’s unique financial practices. You can now view and edit planned costs for past periods, even if you don’t track actuals in ServiceNow, giving you total control and continuity.
Smarter planning and roadmapping
Say goodbye to confusing colour changes! Consistent Roadmap Colours ensure that a single, predictable palette is used to represent status and priority across all your plans. This consistency removes colour ambiguity and helps you and your stakeholders align on status and priorities faster.
No more guessing what a milestone means. Milestone Differentiation introduces unique icons and distinct colours (upcoming, missed, or achieved) so you can instantly see the status of key targets at a glance. They also “stick” as you scroll, so you’ll never lose sight of a critical date.
The new Advanced Quick Filters for roadmaps now support date, boolean, and string fields. This means you can quickly segment your data and find exactly what you’re looking for without manual workarounds, dramatically improving your decision-making speed.
Improved Resource and Project Management
Project managers now have a fast and easy way to check on their project’s staffing. With a single click, you can view a Resource Board based on your project, giving you an immediate, read-only snapshot of all associated resources and potential conflicts.
Rescheduling is now stress-free. The new Move Resource Assignment Capability lets you shift resource assignment dates without accidentally changing the planned effort or task duration. This protects your data integrity and streamlines conflict resolution.
The enhanced Now Assist Project Email Summary is designed to improve project communication. Project managers can now instantly customise and share critical information with key stakeholders without requiring administrative configuration. This capability, which includes tracking changes to the project’s critical path, allows for a faster, more autonomous experience.
Collaborative Work Management (CWM)
The core of CWM is to break down silos and streamline day-to-day work. The Zurich release adds features that empower teams to be more agile and connected than ever.
Agile Planning for any team
You no longer need a separate tool to manage agile work. CWM now offers a dedicated Agile Sprint Planning tab where you can manage backlogs, create epics and stories, and build sprints for any task type. This standardises how teams work and keeps all your deliveries tracked in one place.
This powerful feature allows you to manage and visualise multiple work types, like incidents, changes, and user stories, on a single CWM board. Teams can filter what they see and manage both planned and everyday work in one central location, eliminating the need to switch between different applications.
Summary
The ServiceNow Zurich release is a massive step forward for both SPM and CWM. By adding new AI-powered tools, flexible financial controls, and enhanced collaboration capabilities, ServiceNow is empowering teams to not only get work done but to ensure that work is strategically aligned and more efficient than ever.
Ready to explore these new features? Contact us to schedule a demo and see how the Zurich release can elevate your work.
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