Purpose

The purpose of this process is to ensure that the appropriate mix of services is delivered by the service provider to meet the requirements of the customer. The process enables us to track a number of important items of information about our services, including the investment that has been made and the interaction with other services.

The information captured in the service portfolio links the services being provided to the business outcomes they support. This ensures that activities across the whole of the lifecycle are aligned to ensure that value is delivered to customers.

Objectives

The objectives of service portfolio management are as follows:

• Provide a process that allows an organization to manage its overall service provision. Through this process, the service provider develops mechanisms to investigate and decide which services to provide to its customers. This decision is based on the analysis of the potential return that could be generated and acceptable levels of risk.
• Maintain the definitive managed portfolio of services provided by the service provider. Each service should be identified, along with the business need and outcome it supports.
• Provide an information source that allows the organization to understand and evaluate how the IT services provided enable the organization to achieve its desired outcomes. It will also be a mechanism for tracking how IT can respond to organizational changes in the internal or external environments.
• Provide control over which services are offered, to whom, with what level of investment, and under what conditions.
• Track the organizational spend on IT services throughout their lifecycle, allowing for regular reviews of the strategy to ensure that the appropriate investment is being made for the chosen strategic approach.
• Provide information to enable decision making regarding the viability of services and when they should be retired.

Scope

Service portfolio management has a broad scope because it covers all the services a service provider delivers as well as those it is planning to deliver and those that have been retired from live operation.

Because the primary concern of the service portfolio management process is to determine whether the services being provided are delivering value, the process should cover the ability to track investment and expenditure on services. The outcome of the process can then be compared to the desired business outcomes in terms of the value the customer requires.

Internal and external service providers may have a different approach to the way they connect services to business outcomes. For an internal service provider, it will be necessary to work closely with the business units in the organization to compare the outcomes with the investment. External service providers are more likely to have this information captured as part of the agreement or contract that defines the relationship with the business. The services they provide are also more likely to be directly associated with revenue generation or support revenue generation services.

Service portfolio management should be responsible for evaluating the value of the services provided throughout the whole of their lifecycle. It is also important to be able to compare the merits of the existing services against those that are being planned or the benefits they provide in replacing retired services. In this way, we can be certain that the services provided meet the required business needs.

The Service Portfolio

We are now going to review the service portfolio itself, which is the output from the process. Figure 17.1 illustrates the components of the service portfolio: the service pipeline, service catalog, and retired services.

The service portfolio is the complete set of services managed by a service provider. This includes the contractual and financial commitments across internal, external, or third-party providers; new service development activity; and improvement initiatives. All services should be included, whether they are visible, customer-facing services, such as the core or the enhancing services, or the enabling services that support them.

The service portfolio also covers the services that are currently only in a conceptual stage, potentially the services that would be developed if there were no limit on budget, resources, or capabilities. The service portfolio shows the allocation of all the resources in use across the whole service lifecycle. Each stage of the lifecycle will be making demands on the available resources and capabilities, and the service portfolio allows us to see those allocations and resolve any potential conflicts according to the importance of the business outcomes.

Any new project or development should have an approved financial plan and allocated budget demonstrating the cost recovery or return on investment, and this will be captured in the service portfolio. By ensuring that we have the right mix of services across the pipeline and catalog, we can make sure we have the correct funding for all of the IT service provider activities across the service lifecycle.

As you will see later, the service catalog is the only part of the service portfolio that is customer facing, the information it contains may be used as part of customer-facing reports, presentations, and business cases. The live operational services, as captured in the service catalog, are the only services that will recover costs or earn profits.

Value

Service portfolio management helps the business to decide where to invest. Services are implemented not just because they are a good idea or because they are an industry standard, but because there is a good business case. The expected outcomes are compared with the investment required to build and deliver a service. This means that customers understand what will be delivered and under what conditions; they can then decide whether the service is a good or bad investment.

The service provider, through the decisions made as part of service portfolio management, can help its customers achieve their business strategies.

Policies, Principles, and Basic Concepts

The service portfolio represents the commitments and investments made by a service provider across all customers and market spaces. It shows any contractual commitments and which new services are being developed. It will also include current service improvement plans initiated by continual service improvement (CSI). Some services are not provided directly by the service provider but are bought in from suppliers. The service provider remains responsible for these third-party services, since they form an integral part of the customer service offering. An example of such a service would be the wide area networking service. It is important to note, therefore, that the portfolio includes the complete set of services that are managed by a service provider.

Service portfolio management ensures that the service provider understands all the services it provides, the investment that has been made in these services, and the objectives and required returns for each one. This knowledge is necessary before tactical plans for management of the services are made. The process plays a role in strategy generation, ensuring that the agreed strategy is appropriately executed at each stage. This prevents common mistakes such as choosing a new tool before optimizing processes. It also ensures that what is actually done matches what was intended. The service portfolio management approach also helps managers to allocate resources in line with business priorities.

In addition, the service portfolio identifies the services that the organization would provide if it had unlimited resources, capabilities, and funding. This helps identify what can and cannot be done. Every decision to provide a service uses resources that could have been spent on providing a different service, so the choice of what to prioritize and the implications of that choice in terms of the allocation of resources and capabilities are understood. It also ensures that the approval to develop potential services in the pipeline into catalog services is granted only with approved funding and a financial plan for recovering costs where appropriate (internal) or showing profit (external).

Service Catalog

The catalog is a database of information regarding the services available to customers—these may be already live or available for deployment. This part of the service portfolio is published to customers, and it includes information about deliverables, prices, contact points, and ordering and request processes. It is essential that due diligence is undertaken before a service is added to the catalog so that the service provider understands how to deliver it successfully, and at the expected cost. The service catalog also contains details about standard service requests, enabling users to request those services using the appropriate channels. These requests may be channeled through a web portal and then routed to the appropriate request fulfillment procedure.

The service catalog also informs service portfolio management decisions. It identifies the linkage between service assets, services, and business outcomes and any potential gaps in the service portfolio.

Take a look at Figure 17.2, which shows linkages between service assets, the services they support, and the business outcomes they facilitate:

• The boxes on the left are service assets used by the service provider to provide services. These could be assets such as servers, databases, applications, and network devices.
• The box in the middle shows the services in the service catalog. There are two layers of services shown. The layer on the left shows supporting services, which are usually not seen by the customer directly, such as application hosting (contained in a view of the service catalog called the technical or supporting service catalog). The second layer of services includes customer-facing services.
• The boxes on the right are business outcomes, which the business achieves when it uses these services.

Services that are performing well and are popular are identified. They may be allocated additional resources to ensure that they continue to perform as required and will be able to satisfy increased demand.

Services that are performing in an acceptable manner but could be improved in terms of efficiencies or functionality are deemed viable services. Introducing new attributes, addressing warranty or utility issues, improving how well they match demand, and setting new pricing policies are all approaches that may be used to make the services more popular. Services that are unpopular or that consistently perform badly may be marked for retirement.

A subset of the service catalog may be third-party or outsourced services. These extend the range of the service catalog in terms of customers and market spaces. Figure 17.3 shows how these third-party services may be used as a stopgap to address underserved or unserved demand until items in the service pipeline are phased into operation. They may also be used to replace services being retired from the service catalog.

A comparison of the typical content and purpose of the service portfolio and service catalog is illustrated in Figure 17.4.

Service Portfolio Management through the Service Lifecycle

Here we’ll look briefly at the role played by service portfolio management across the rest of the service lifecycle. Although service portfolio management is a process within service strategy, it also plays an important part in every stage in the service lifecycle. We start by looking at its role in service design:

• In the service design lifecycle stage, service portfolio management ensures that design work is prioritized according to business needs and clarifies how the service will be measured by the business. It ensures that each service is clearly linked to the agreed-to business outcomes and that the service assets used and performance levels required of the service are documented. Together with demand management information, service portfolio management gives a clear picture of when service will be required and the expected levels of demand. Service portfolio management helps the design team focus on objectives, outcomes, and priorities. It also works with the PMO or project manager, ensuring that the services are built on time, to specification, and to budget.
• Service transition builds and tests the services that will be placed into the service catalog. Change management is used to authorize the move of a service into the service catalog. This authorization ensures that the final product is ready and can be supported, that it is technically feasible and financially viable, and that sufficient operational capability is in place. Before adding items to the catalog, the impact on commitments made to customers must be assessed and sufficient resources and capabilities set aside to provide the service. If resources cannot be made available, the service may be prevented from going live.
• Service operation delivers the service in the service catalog part of the service portfolio. Service portfolio management provides operations with an understanding of the services and how and why they need to be delivered. This is an important input to defining standard operating procedures, event management, incident management priorities, and escalation procedures.
• Continual service improvement evaluates whether the services in the portfolio met the stated objectives, and if not, it identifies ways in which the situation can be rectified. CSI also evaluates the business cases and objectives to ensure that they are still valid and that service portfolio management continues to prioritize services appropriately.

Process Activities, Methods, and Techniques

Service portfolio management consists of four main phases of activity. We are going to examine these one by one:

• The first stage is the Define stage. This phase focuses on documenting and understanding existing services and new services. Each service must have a documented business case. Data for each service, such as which service assets are required and where investments are made, needs to be validated.
• The second stage is the Analyze stage. The analysis of services in the portfolio will indicate whether the service is able to optimize value and how supply and demand can be prioritized and balanced.
• The third stage is the Approve stage. Every service needs to be approved, and the level of investment must be authorized to ensure sufficient resources to deliver the anticipated levels of service.
• The final stage is the Charter stage. A charter is a document authorizing the project and stating its scope, terms, and references. Services are not just built on request from anyone in the organization. They have to be formally chartered, and stakeholders need to be kept up-to-date with information about decisions, resource allocation, and actual investments made.

Before we look at the process in detail, it is important to remember how we define the service portfolio itself. We begin by collecting information from all existing services as well as every proposed service. However, the portfolio is not static, and so the data must be refreshed and validated on a recurring basis. How often this happens will depend on the portfolio itself: does it include stable, legacy systems with few changes or a fast-changing area? A reevaluation of the portfolio may be triggered by external events; for example, a merger with or acquisition of another company would require a thorough reevaluation to spot possible duplications.

New and changed service proposals can be initiated from a number of sources as a result of, for example, changes to plans or the identification of a service improvement plan. They need to be formally assessed and approved. Service portfolio management maintains a central record of all plans, requests, and submissions that are submitted. In some organizations, they are simply called requests, but they are not the same as standard service requests submitted for request fulfillment, which could lead to confusion. Inputs to service portfolio management may come from the following processes:

• Strategy management is the primary input to service portfolio management. It presents strategic plans outlining initiatives for business opportunities and outcomes along with the services these require. The plans are evaluated by service portfolio management for technical and financial feasibility and ROI.
• Business relationship management receives requests from customers. These may be dealt with through change management, request fulfillment, or incident management, but some will need to be submitted to service portfolio management. They include requests for new services or added functionality or performance improvements to existing services.
• CSI initiates three types of input to service portfolio management. They may include possible improvements to service levels of existing services. Each will be assessed in terms of the investment and the projected return. CSI may also identify new opportunities or gaps in the current portfolio of services or opportunities for improvements in cost, mitigation of risks, and so on, affecting one or several existing services or even the entire operation of the service provider. Note that any opportunities identified by CSI that would require a change in the organization’s strategy are submitted to strategy management.
• Some service management processes involve managing changes to services or modeling warranty and utility options that can be presented to the customer. Many of these would have an impact on investment, so service portfolio management should evaluate these suggested changes before they are initiated.

Triggers

Triggers for service portfolio management are as follows:

• A new or changed strategy—a change to a perspective, position, or pattern of action might impact existing services or service models.
• Business relationship management receives a request for a new or changed service; service portfolio management would help define and formalize this request before submitting it to change management as a change proposal.
• Service improvement opportunities from CSI could involve service portfolio management. Any reported deviation from the specifications, cost, or release time from design, build, and transition teams during the charter stage of the process would involve service portfolio management in estimating the impact and defining corrective action.
• Service level management reviews identify a service failing to deliver its expected outcomes or being used in a different way from how it was intended; service portfolio management would be involved in defining corrective actions.
• Financial management reports that the costs for a service vary significantly from the expectation, thus affecting the potential return on investment for that service; again, service portfolio management would be involved in defining corrective actions.

Inputs

Service portfolio management has the following inputs:

• Strategy plans
• Service improvement opportunities
• Financial reports
• Requests, suggestions, or complaints from the business
• Project updates for services in the charter stage of the process

Outputs

The following list includes the outputs of service portfolio management:

• An up-to-date service portfolio
• Service charters authorizing the work for designing and building new services or changes to existing services
• Reports on the status of new or changed services
• Reports on the investment made in services in the service portfolio and the returns on that investment
• Change proposals to allow change management to assess and schedule the work and resources required to charter services
• Strategic risks that could be added to a central risk register

Interfaces

Interfaces include those with the following processes:

• Service catalog management—service portfolio management determines which services will be placed into the service catalog, whereas service catalog management ensures that this is done.
• Strategy management for IT services defines the overall strategy of services; this strategy determines what type of services should be included in the portfolio. It determines the objectives for investments in terms of anticipated returns and the ideal market spaces that will be targeted.
• Financial management for IT services provides information and tools to enable service portfolio management to perform return on investment calculations; it also helps track the actual costs of services. This information is used to improve the analysis of services and forecasts in the future.
• Demand management provides information about the patterns of business activity that is used to determine the utilization and expected return on investment for the service.
• Business relationship management initiates requests and obtains business information and requirements used in defining services and evaluating whether they would provide a sufficient return on investment. It keeps customers informed about the status of services in service portfolio management.
• Service level management ensures that services are able to achieve the levels of performance defined in service portfolio management and provides feedback when this is not the case.
• Capacity management and availability management ensure that the capacity and availability requirements of chartered services are designed and built.
• IT service continuity management identifies the business impact of risks associated with delivering the service and designs countermeasures and recovery plans to ensure that the service can achieve the objectives defined during service portfolio management.
• Information security management ensures that the confidentiality, integrity, and availability objectives defined during service portfolio management are met.
• The supplier management process identifies situations in which a supplier cannot continue to supply services or a supplier relationship is at risk.
• Change management evaluates the resources required to introduce new services or changes to existing services, thus enabling the service to be chartered. It ensures that all changes involved in designing, building, and releasing the service are controlled and coordinated.
• Service validation and testing ensures that the anticipated functionality and returns of each service can be achieved.
• Knowledge management enables IT managers and architects to make informed decisions about the best service options to meet the organization’s objectives.
• Continual service improvement provides feedback about the actual use and return of services against their anticipated use and return. This information is used to improve services and make changes to the mix and availability of services in the service portfolio.

Information Management

This section provides an overview of the main sources of information for the service portfolio:

• The service portfolio, consisting of a service pipeline, a service catalog, and retired services.
• The project portfolio, which manages services that have been chartered and are in the process of design and build.
• The application portfolio, which allows service portfolio management to understand the relationship between applications and services.
• The customer portfolio and customer agreement portfolio, which allow service portfolio management to understand customer requirements, the services that have been designed to meet those services, and the agreements that have been made to deliver the services.
• Service models, which allow service portfolio management to understand the composition and dynamics of a service before it moves into expensive design and build activity, and where a service may leverage existing investments.
• The service strategy, which provides a framework of anticipated opportunities, constraints, objectives, and desired business outcomes. Service portfolio management is expected to define what mix of services can best meet the strategic objectives of the organization.
• The configuration management system provides data and information that supports the development and assessment of service models and the assessment of new services and changes to existing services.

Roles and Responsibilities

This section describes a number of roles that need to be performed in support of the service portfolio management process.

Critical Success Factors and Key Performance Indicators

Finally, we cover the CSFs and KPIs for this process. We will cover some examples, but for the full list, see the ITIL Service Strategy publication:

• Critical success factor: “The existence of a formal process to investigate and decide which services to provide.”
  • KPI: A formal service portfolio management process exists under the ownership of the service portfolio management process owner.
  • KPI: The service portfolio management process is audited and reviewed annually and meets its objectives.
• Critical success factor: “The ability to document each service provided, together with the business need it meets and the business outcome it supports.”
  • KPI: A service portfolio exists and is used as the basis for deciding which services to offer. An audit shows that every service is documented in the service portfolio.
  • KPI: There is a documented process for defining the business need and business outcome, which is formally owned by the service portfolio management process owner.
  • KPI: Each service in the service portfolio is linked to at least one business outcome. This is verified through a regular review of the service portfolio.

Challenges

Service portfolio management is presented with the following challenges:

• The lack of access to customer business information required to enable service portfolio management to understand the desired business outcomes and strategies
• The absence of a formal project management approach, which makes chartering and tracking services through the design and transition stages more difficult
• The absence of a project portfolio, which makes assessing the impact of new initiatives on new services or proposed changes to services difficult
• Difficulty in identifying objectives, use, and return on investment of services due to the lack of a customer portfolio and customer agreement portfolio
• A service portfolio focusing purely on the service provider aspects of services, which makes it difficult to calculate the value of services, to model future utilization, or to validate the customer requirements for the service
• The lack of a formal change management process to control the introduction of new services and manage changes to existing services

Risks

There are a number of risks to service portfolio management:

• Responding to customer pressure and offering services without validated or complete information and without a full investigation into the risks involved. Service portfolio management is concerned with reducing risks by having a complete understanding of the service being offered; a hurried response negates the whole process.
• Offering services without defining how they will be measured. Without agreeing to this, we cannot calculate the return on investment. A service may be delivering value, but this cannot be proved, making the service vulnerable to being discontinued due to cost cutting.

Purpose

The purpose of the service catalog management process is to provide and maintain a single source of consistent information on all operational services. It may also include those that are being prepared to be run operationally. The service catalog management process ensures that the service catalog is widely available to those who are authorized to access it.

Objectives

The objectives of the service catalog management process include managing the information contained within the service catalog. This ensures that the service catalog is accurate and reflects the current details, status, interfaces, and dependencies of all services that are being run, or being prepared to run, in the live environment.

Another objective is that this process should ensure that the service catalog is made available to those approved to access it in a manner that supports their effective and efficient use of its information. This may vary depending on the audience; for example, technical support staff members need a different perspective on the services than the users.

Finally, it is important to ensure that the service catalog supports the evolving needs of all other service management processes for service catalog information, including all interface and dependency information.

Scope

The scope of the service catalog management process is to provide and maintain accurate information on all services that are being transitioned or that have been transitioned to the live environment. It is up to the organization to define the point at which it is comfortable having services displayed as part of the service catalog. The services presented in the service catalog may be listed individually, or more typically, some or all of the services may be presented in the form of service packages.

The service catalog management process covers the following items:

• Contribution to the definition of services and service packages
• Development and maintenance of service and service package descriptions appropriate for the service catalog
• Production and maintenance of an accurate service catalog
• Interfaces, dependencies, and consistency between the service catalog and the overall service portfolio
• Interfaces and dependencies between all services and supporting services within the service catalog and the configuration management system (CMS)
• Interfaces and dependencies between all services, and supporting components and configuration items (CIs) within the service catalog and the CMS

The service catalog management process does not include the following:

• Detailed attention to capturing, maintaining, and using service asset and configuration data; this is performed through the service asset and configuration management process
• Detailed attention to capturing, maintaining, and fulfilling service requests; this is performed through the request fulfillment process.

Value

The service catalog provides a central source of information on the IT services delivered by the service provider organization. It includes a customer-facing view (or views) of the IT services in use, how they are intended to be used, the business processes they enable, and the levels and quality of service the customer can expect for each service.

Through the work of service catalog management, organizations can do the following:

• Ensure a common understanding of IT services and improved relationships between the customer and service provider by utilizing the service catalog as a marketing and communication tool
• Improve service provider focus on customer outcomes by correlating internal service provider activities and service assets to business processes and outcomes
• Improve efficiency and effectiveness of other service management processes by leveraging the information contained in or connected to the service catalog
• Improve knowledge, alignment, and focus on the business value of each service throughout the service provider organization and its activities

Policies

Each organization should develop and maintain a policy with regard to both the overall service portfolio and the constituent service catalog, relating to the services recorded within them and what details are recorded (including what statuses are recorded for each of the services).

The policy should also contain details of responsibilities for each section of the overall service portfolio and the scope of each of the constituent sections. This will include policies regarding when a service is published in the service catalog as well as when it will be removed from the service catalog and appear only in the retired services section of the service portfolio.

Principles and Basic Concepts

Different types of service are delivered by a service provider. In Figure 17.5, you can see the types of service described by the framework.

Customer-facing services are IT services that are seen by the customer. They are typically services that support the customer’s business units/business processes, directly facilitating some outcome or outcomes desired by the customer.

Supporting services are the IT services that support or “underpin” the customer-facing services. They are typically invisible to the customer but essential to the delivery of customer-facing IT services.

To be most effective, the service catalog views should be tailored to meet the requirements of the audience. The information required from the customer’s perspective is different than that required by the technical support teams. In Figure 17.6 you can see the perspective of the service catalog in two views, the business or customer view and the technical view.

The catalog should form a part of the configuration management system. This should be structured and presented in a manner appropriate to the organization.

In the example in Figure 17.7, the customer-facing catalog has been partitioned such that a business unit has sight of only the services it uses. This might be appropriate for a commercial service provider, where two different customer groups do not need to share visibility across the whole catalog. The two customer groups are generically referred to as either wholesale or retail customers.

Process Activities, Methods, and Techniques

We will now consider the process activities from a management perspective. There are a number of activities to consider, not least of which is the agreement and documentation of services.

Key activities include ensuring that the services are defined and described appropriately within the documentation.

The service catalog should interface with the service portfolio, so the processes of service catalog management and service portfolio management should be closely linked. This will enable the content of both to remain accurate and up-to-date. The service catalog is a significant information source for the process of IT service continuity and supports business continuity management, ensuring that appropriate services are maintained according to the continuity needs of the business. It also serves to capture the relationships with suppliers and internal service provider teams (such as service asset and configuration management), supporting the understanding of the overall IT estate. The service catalog supports both service level and business relationship management, ensuring alignment to business requirements and processes.

All of these interactions require attention from the service catalog process manager to ensure the continued effective use of the information captured in the catalog.

Triggers, Inputs, Outputs, and Interfaces

First, we will consider the triggers for this process.

Information Management

The key information for this process is that which is contained within the service catalog itself. Because the service catalog is part of the service portfolio, the main input for this information comes from the business via either the business relationship management or service level management process. It is important to verify the information for accuracy before it is recorded within the service catalog. The information and the service catalog itself need to be maintained using the change management process.

There are many different approaches to managing service catalog information:

• Intranet solutions that are built by the service provider organization and leverage technology already in place
• Commercially available solutions designed for service catalog management
• Solutions that are part of a more comprehensive service management suite

The service catalog data may be held in a single repository or multiple repositories. Some service providers may maintain the data that supports different views of the service catalog in different locations or toolsets.

For example, detailed data for supporting services may be stored in the CMS and presented via the same interface used to access other service asset and configuration data, whereas data on customer-facing services may be held for presentation to the customers in a browser-based application via the corporate intranet.

Constructing different views of the service catalog should be based on the perspective and requirements of the intended audience. The service provider should consider which services (rows of data) and which data elements or fields (columns of data) should be included in each view. For example, details of relationships of supporting services may be important to include in a view intended for staff members of the service provider, whereas these details are typically of no interest to customers and are likely to be excluded from a customer-facing view.

Integration with the management of the service portfolio is critical here, as is the ability to access other closely related functionality. Customers should be able to view their service level agreement monitoring reports or access a self-help portal for service requests. Some commercially available service catalog tools are maturing to offer management of the full-service portfolio from proposal to retirement.

Each organization will have to understand the solution that will best serve its current and future needs. It is important, however, not to confuse the toolset used to present the service catalog with the catalog itself. An organization with a paper-based catalog and an organization with a robust technical solution both still have a service catalog.

Roles and Responsibilities

This section describes the roles and responsibilities in addition to the generic roles and responsibilities as described in Chapter 1, associated with the service catalog process.

Critical Success Factors and Key Performance Indicators

The following list includes some sample critical success factors and key performance indicators for service catalog management.

• Critical success factor: “An accurate service catalog”
  • KPI: An increase in the number of services recorded and managed within the service catalog as a percentage of those being delivered and transitioned in the live environment
  • KPI: Reduction (measured as a percentage) in the number of variances detected between the information contained within the service catalog and the “real-world” situation
• Critical success factor: “Business users’ awareness of the services being provided”
  • KPI: Increase (measured as a percentage) in completeness of the customer-facing views of the service catalog against operational services
  • KPI: Increase (measured as a percentage) in business user survey responses showing knowledge of services listed in the service catalog
  • KPI: Increase in measured business user access to intranet-based service catalog
• Critical success factor: “IT staff awareness of the technology supporting the services”
  • KPI: Increase (measured as a percentage) in completeness of supporting services against the IT components that make up those services
  • KPI: Increase in service desk and other IT staff having access to information to support all live services, measured by the percentage of incidents with the appropriate service-related information

Exam Essentials

Understand the processes of service portfolio management and service catalog management. You need to understand the purpose, objectives, scope, principles, and activities of service portfolio management and service catalog management.

Be able to describe the contents of the service portfolio and their relationship to the lifecycle. It is important to be able to identify the various components of the service portfolio. It consists of the service pipeline, the service catalog, and retired services. Be able to describe how each of these interfaces with the rest of the service lifecycle and the processes from the other lifecycle stages.

Know the business value, challenges, and risks of each process. Be able to explain the value the business derives from each process and the challenges and risks involved in running the process.

Understand the exclusions from the service catalog. Service asset and configuration management is concerned with the management of CIs. Fulfillment of service requests is not managed through the service catalog.

Explain the different views of the service catalog. There are a number of views that can be used to display information in the service catalog. Be able to differentiate between technical and business views and explain the purpose for each. It is also important to understand when to provide multiple views of the service catalog to the organization.

Understand the relationship between the service catalog and the service portfolio. Be able to explain the relationship between the service portfolio and the service catalog, and understand when a service moves from the service portfolio pipeline into the service catalog.

Explain the role of information management in service catalog management. Information is critical to the service catalog management process. The output from the process is accurate information and its maintenance.