Vancouver / Service Portfolio Management and Taxonomy Nodes

[Debs McCann]

Has anyone upgraded to Vancouver and already had a Service Portfolio configured previously (SPM), where taxonomy nodes were required to be configured (its mandatory). I am expecting Vancouver not to require Nodes to be configured. Is this correct?

[Deb McDaniel]

Yes, because the product line/documentation could be more straightforward. What is the difference between digital portfolio management, strategic portfolio management, technical portfolio management, application portfolio management, and service portfolio management? Don't get me wrong, I understand the "theoretical" differences, but how do these all play together in the ServiceNow ecosystem, and how/where does Service Portfolio Management fit?

[Liz Fassone]

The CSDM White Paper attached should answer your questions. For more info see CSDM product docs site and follow CSDM Community for white paper updates.

The short answer is that these 'management' suites cater to different personas in the organisation. For example, Application Portfolio Management is intended for Enterprise Architects. The Strategic Portfolio Management is intended for Portfolio and Project Managers etc. Service Portfolio Management is for Portfolio Owners and Service Owners. These owners can structure and design services for managing and tracking - i.e. SLAs, catalogues, surveys etc. 

ServiceNow is able to provide a source of truth to all by interrogating the same data. It also has the added bonus of being able to inform different personas about things happening in their world and outside their world that they would need to know. 

[j3hall]

Liz,

My ServiceNow environment does not have the Performance Analytics module and there are no plans to add it at this time. Would Portfolio Management still have significant utility for Project Managers and Service Owners even without the ability to see KPI metrics on their service dashboards?

[Liz Fassone]

What are the project managers and service owners doing today for structuring and tracking services? Do they manage those service lifecycles manually? Are those defined business services in ServiceNow and used by your IT teams for tracking incidents, changes, outages etc.? 

See below screenshot of business service from the 'Service Portfolio' view. 

You can generate reports or create dashboards for services with the standard reporting feature too. 

If this information is populated into ServiceNow then you can 'switch on' those KPIs in future. 

For a list of SPM phases, who uses and benefits, see here: 

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/vancouver-it-service-management/page/product/service-portfolio-ma... 

[j3hall]

Liz,

Thank you for the response, apologies for the delayed reply. We are currently working on building out our Service Portfolio and will likely just build out reports and dashboards using the out of the box reporting functionality.