Service Portfolio Management

A Service portfolio describes a provider’s services in terms of business value. It articulates business needs and the provider’s response to those needs. By definition, business value terms correspond to marketing terms, providing a means for comparing service competitiveness across alternative providers. By acting as the basis of a decision framework, a Service Portfolio either clarifies or helps to clarify the following strategic questions:

• Why should a customer buy these services?
• Why should they buy these services from us?
• What are the pricing or chargeback model s?
• What are our strengths and weaknesses, priorities and risk?
• How should our resource s and capabilities be allocated?

Organization s embarking on a service-orientation journey have a tendency to view it as a series of tactical programme s. Armed with a conceptual understanding of services, organizations frequently rush to industrialize service outcomes. The impulse is to launch initiatives in organizational change or process redesign. While these are important fulfilment elements, there is an order worth noting.

While this order is not absolute it does serve two purposes. First, it warns against missteps such as performing organizational design before knowing what services to offer, or performing a tool selection before optimizing processes. Second, it signals the early need for a Service Portfolio, one of the most vital yet often missing constructs for driving service strategies and managing service investments.

Financial managers tailor a portfolio of investments based on their customer’s risk and reward profile. Regardless of the profile, the objective is the same: maximize return at an acceptable risk level. When conditions change, appropriate changes are made to the portfolio. There is a need for applying comparable practices when managing a portfolio of services. The value of a Service Portfolio strategy is demonstrated through the ability to anticipate change while maintaining traceability to strategy and planning.

Service portfolio management is a dynamic method for governing investments in service management across the enterprise and managing them for value.

The operative word is method. Often the term portfolio is marginalized to a list of services, application s, asset s or project s. A portfolio is essentially a group of investments that share similar characteristics. They are grouped by size, discipline or strategic value. There are few fundamental differences between IT portfolio management, project portfolio management and SPM. All are enabling techniques for governance. The difference is in the implementation details.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14