How Service Portfolio Management Supports IT Business Goals?

What is it that makes certain IT organizations and business houses successful and ride high on profits than others? The magic formula is arriving at well-informed investment decisions. In today’s competitive market place, no company would want to implement services based on the fact that it appears to be good idea. The services can only be implemented if it proves beneficial for the business house or company and ensures a great ROI. This is where Service Portfolio Management (SPM) acts instrumental.

Understanding Service Portfolio Management

Simply put, Service Portfolio Managements aims to place IT companies as a strategic alliance to business, by enabling the generation of a wide range of value-added and comprehensive services. It achieves this through ongoing service management, right from the times requests are send in until it’s discontinued. SPM comprises of strict guidelines and policies concerning the way services need to be designed, executed, assisted, ordered and even priced.

Components of Service Portfolio Management

There are multiple core elements of IT SPM that includes streamlined planning, end-to-end assessment and fine-tuning, delivery of service across the overall lifecycle. The 3 core components include the following:

Service pipeline – This indicates the services that are presently being generated.

Service catalogue – This denotes present services that are accessible to the end users.

Retired services- This indicates the services that were previously available and presently not being implemented anymore.

Service Portfolio Management – The Present Scenario

Though in the recent times the significance of SPM has been emphasised in ITIL Version 3, the discipline gets overlooked as compared to other IT service management procedures, like problem management, change management and incident management. However, as the new age and progressive IT companies aim to attain increased visibility into IT solutions and provide excellent assistance to end users, SPM is gaining its much required gravitas.

It has been observed that majority of companies undertake a portfolio of projects and programmes and in the process ignore the operational systems. Product Portfolio Management (PPM) takes into consideration the change and does not focus on the present state. On the other hand, SPM targets the services involved in production along with the projected alterations to the service. It takes into consideration resource distribution across both Run and Build. Furthermore, SPM takes into account the changes that might occur to the present service whilst a company takes initiatives to introduce new ones. When companies fail to consider these aspects that’s when the IT departments start losing valuable projects.

How Service Portfolio Management benefits business?

Forward thinking organizations and business houses that implement IT Service Portfolio Management attain visible benefits over others that don’t. To quote Forrester, a correct implementation of SPM allows the CIO’s with the capacity to “transform IT assets and their associated costs into business services that they can price and link to business value. IT’s position within the firm morphs from a cost center to a value-added service provider with transparency into its operations and spending.”

That is not all. There are other core benefits like:

Having access to greater and better business insights about the influence of IT services on the overall business performance

Attaining a compact alignment between the strategic business objectives and IT services

Ensuring maximized cost-effectiveness through a precise consolidation of improvement of inadequate services, duplicate services and withdrawal of unnecessary or low-value services

Improved capability to cater to the service demands

Enhanced productivity of IT assistance staff, via an improved recognition of as well as a maximized focus on the services that provide maximum value

Arriving at well-informed and smart decision-making concerning service creation, delivery, enhancement and retirement

Thus, Service Portfolio Management offers a holistic perspective of everything. It helps a company define its challenges, capabilities, business terms and needs. It also helps a company to solicit guidance and apt decisions from its executives, peers and governors on the ways to allocate resources and initiatives, justifying the same.

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