SPM Xanadu Release: Accelerate, starting today with Now Assist for SPM

Keeping the tradition alive, here are my top choice for SPM's Xanadu capabilities, things that every customer would want to explore further and put to use. A lot is targeted towards improving collaboration across teams and improving productivity to unlock better alignment of work to strategy.

We have released a bunch of Now Assist for SPM capabilities which will help a variety of personas to put AI to work for SPM. These are capabilities built on Now Assist, and hence guarantees security and workflow specific context as compared to other Gen AI generic platforms.

So, sit back and enjoy this blog.

Multi feedback Summarization with Now Assist for SPM

Consider this situation for the product managers within your organisation. They receive a lot of feedback from their users about the products that they are responsible for. Feedback about improvements, things which thy don't like and wishes for new capabilities. SPM has Product Feedback which helps product managers to better manage this process. Read my previous blog to get a high level understanding of how Product Feedback works.

What we did in this release is turbo-charge Product Feedback by infusing our Now Assist capabilities to summarize multiple feedback.

What's the big deal with summarization you ask?

With multi-feedback summarization, product managers don't have to painfully go through each of the feedbacks manually. Now Assist will summarize these feedbacks and hence reduce a lot of cognitive load for product managers so that they can focus on higher priority and more complex activities.

In simple terms, it helps product managers be more productive and focus on the right things.        

And it is not just summarization. Since Now Assist is embedded in our product, the summarization is then used to create other work items, such as demand, epic, projects etc.

Summarize, Elaborate and Shorten Content in Docs with Now Assist for SPM

If you are not using the docs components in SPM, you should! This is already embedded in a number of places - Project Workspace, Product Feedback, Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) etc.

We have now embedded Now Assist in the docs component, so that product managers, project managers etc can use Now Assist to draft content in SPM. There is no need to swivel chair to another application for such activities.

A couple of scenarios where you can apply this:

• As a product manager, you can post all your meeting notes in the docs (for example in Enterprise Agile Planning) and let Now Assist summarize and elaborate the content. This will help you to better communicate the key requirements to the rest of your team.
• As a project manager, you can use Now Assist in the project workspace docs to create concise project charter, status reports etc. This will help to better communicate your project information to your stakeholders.

I would really be interested where you can find more use of this amazing capability. Do let me know in the comment section so that others can learn from your experience.        

Scenario Planning in Strategic Planning Workspace

As a portfolio manager, you can now simulate your portfolio plan to:

1. Prioritise planning item
2. Change the dates of the planning items.

You can also compare the scenarios and let the approver approve the best scenario.

And we just got started with scenario planning in SPW in this release. A lot more is planned for upcoming store and family releases, thereby helping you to gradually pick up this brand new way of simulating, comparing and approving portfolio scenarios.

And by the way, we now let you export the portfolio plan roadmap to PPT! This was one of the most common asks ever since we released export to PPT in SPM. And if you are not using the export to PPT already, I would suggest you to explore the capability. It is already available in Project Workspace and Strategic Planning Workspace (SPW).

Enhancements for Project Managers and Resource Managers

First for some music in the ears of project managers and financial controllers. We now support flexible budgeting (monthly, quarterly and yearly). This means, budget approvers can plan and approve budget at these granular levels, and project managers can compare costs against approved budget at each of these levels.

Project Managers can switch to a list view in the project workspace. This also includes filtering capability to quickly get to the project that you are looking for.

Also in the project schedule view, project managers can easily compare assigned vs actuals hours for the resource's task assignment. This is a very powerful usability feature which will help your project managers to keep track of the hours and update the future assignment hours based on the previous actuals.

And for Resource Managers, we have gone full steam in the Resource Manager workspace. They can now:

1. Split Resource Assignments: Use this when resources are unavailable for a couple of days/periods etc.
2. Create Operational resource plans: RMs can create operational resource plans (these are plans which you can use to allocate resources to buckets such as KTLO, Admin, OOO etc) right from the workspace now.
3. Actuals vs Allocated View: Use this view to compare assigned vs actual hours.
4. Create Project Level card: You can create cards by individual project too. Why is this useful you ask? If you are a Project manager and want one single overview of all your project resources, you can create a card just for your project (s).

This is it for SPM. Read the full release notes in our docs site and visit this article in community for a more detailed presentation of our Xanadu capabilities (SPM Delta deck)

I will also post another blog for our Enterprise Architecture capabilities in the next few days. Wait, is that a new product or something that we already had? I will tell you in my next blog ;)