Service Portfolio Management

Service Portfolio Management is the governance processes of the service portfolio. The process is one by which a service provider can manage their investments across the service lifecycle by taking into account every service in terms of the business value provided by it. A service provider makes use of service portfolio management to control the entry of any service into the service portfolio by tracking any investment in services through its entire lifecycle starting from the development till the delivery and retired stages.

Service Portfolio Management (SPM) enables Managers to assess the quality requirements and associated costs. The primary goal of Service Portfolio Management is to realize maximum value whilst managing accompanying risks and costs. Five basic questions that need to be answered for Service Portfolio Management to help decide what services clients require:

• Why should a client buy these services?
• Why should a client buy these services from our organization?
• What are the price and charge back models?
• What are our strengths and weakness, priorities and risks?
• How should our resources and capabilities be allocated?

Product Managers play a key role in Service Portfolio Management. Their main responsibility is to manage services as products during their entire lifecycle. Other roles include the co-ordination and focus of the organization as well as owning the Service Catalogue.

Objective of Service Portfolio Management
The purpose of Service Portfolio Management is to create, manage and improve a service portfolio containing a detailed design package for each IT service. Service Portfolio Management contributes to an integrated Service Management approach by achieving the following goals:

• Every service planned and operated by the provider is documented.
• Every new service runs through a set of standardized activities and procedures to ensure that essential management-relevant information, for service delivery and support, are documented and provided to the relevant management processes.
• Every service and their design packages are reviewed at regular intervals.
• Every service is reviewed within the Continual Service Improvement Process
• Through the service portfolio, an information base for a service catalog is provided.

Project Portfolio Management Vs. Service Portfolio Management
It can be argued that while Project Portfolio Management is still the key IT Governance player in most IT organizations, it is absolutely important to extend this by a predominant Service Portfolio Management in order to be a successful IT Service Provider, delivering value to the business.

If we compare Project and Service Portfolio Management, they have obviously many things in common. First of all they both share the same technique and same goal of general Portfolio Management: Making right decisions about investments (by the way, interestingly enough this is not different from classical Financial Portfolio Management, which is completely non-IT):

Project and Service Portfolio Management compared

source: ITIL.ORG

• For Service Portfolio Management this means that each new service or change to an existing service needs to have a clear business case, showing the value to the business (part of the service pipeline). This portfolio technique is continued by tracking the investment of services throughout their lifecyle (service design, transition and operation), thus enabling the company to evaluate its strategy, as well as its ability to execute according to their strategy.
• On the other hand, Project Portfolio Management does the same for the lifecycle of projects. It ensures you do the right projects the right way. Since new services or changes to existing services are typically managed as projects, the Project Portfolio Management is obviously very much part of the Service Portfolio Management (and not the other way around).

See Also

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)
ITIL Availability Management
ITIL Continual Service Improvement (CSI)
ITIL Event Management
ITIL Facilities Management
ITIL Problem Management
ITIL Service Delivery
ITIL Service Design
ITIL Service Lifecycle
ITIL Service Strategy
ITIL Service Transition
ITIL Service Value Chain (SVC)
ITIL Service Value System (SVS)
ITIL Service Operation
IT Governance
IT Infrastructure
IT Operations (Information Technology Operations)
Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT)
Balanced Scorecard
Enterprise Risk Management (ERM)
Risk Management
IT Strategy (Information Technology Strategy)
Business Strategy
Corporate Governance
Corporate Strategy
Enterprise Architecture
COSO Internal Control- Integrated Framework
Compliance

References

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