Exploring Service Portfolio Management

Release version: Brazil
Updated September 10, 2026
3 minutes to read
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Summary of Exploring Service Portfolio Management

The Service Portfolio Management application in ServiceNow enables customers to document, organize, and manage IT services, service offerings, and portfolios in a standardized, structured format. It helps optimize service value and reduce costs, supporting streamlined IT operations and better alignment with customer demands. Service portfolios are divided into three key phases:

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  • Service pipeline: Services proposed or under review, not yet operational.
  • Service catalog: Operational and available services, often represented in request catalogs.
  • Retired services: Services no longer available but retained for historical reference.

Key Features

  • Role-based access: Different users such as Portfolio Admins, Editors, and Viewers, as well as Service Admins, Editors, and Viewers, have defined capabilities ranging from creating and editing services and portfolios to viewing them.
  • Service and portfolio management: Create and manage service portfolios, service offerings, taxonomy nodes, commitments, support teams, and user subscriptions.
  • Service monitoring: Log outages, assess availability and SLA commitments, and evaluate service impacts from dependencies.
  • Integration: Supports integration with the Common Service Data Model (CSDM) for standardized service data management.
  • Time zone configuration: Set availability result time zones to align with your organizational context.

Key Outcomes

  • Gain comprehensive visibility into current, future, and retired IT services across one or multiple portfolios.
  • Enable structured management of services to align IT offerings with business needs and customer expectations.
  • Streamline service lifecycle management by tracking service statuses, supporting service request catalogs, and logging operational incidents.
  • Empower different roles with tailored access to create, edit, monitor, or view portfolios and services, ensuring appropriate governance and collaboration.
  • Leverage integration with CSDM to maintain consistent service definitions and data across IT management processes.

The Service Portfolio Management application enables you to document and manage your services, service offerings, and portfolios using a standardized, structured format.

Service Portfolio Management overview

The Service Portfolio Management application enables you to create, organize, and manage portfolios of IT services. It optimizes the value of services and reduces their costs to help you to streamline your IT business operations and meet customer demands. A service portfolio includes information related to the organization of services and data about each service, including status and related items.

Service portfolios typically have three phases:
  • Service pipeline: Services that aren't yet operational or available for use. These services are typically proposed or services in review for suitability. In this phase, you can analyze and manage the future growth and time line for each service.
  • Service catalog: Services that are operational and available for use, as well as design and development. These services typically have representation in a request catalog.
  • Retired services: Services that are no longer operational or available for use. These services can include essential historical information.

Service Portfolio Management users

The following table presents the most common users for Service Portfolio Management. For more information about core roles and tables, see Installed with Service Portfolio Management.

Table 1. Users
User Description
Portfolio admin

Set up, create, edit, and delete services and service portfolios. Manage portfolios including related commitments and availability. Update taxonomy nodes, services, service offerings, and reparent services.
Portfolio editor

Edit and delete services and service portfolios. Update portfolios, taxonomy nodes, services, service offerings, and reparent services.
Portfolio viewer View portfolios, taxonomy nodes, services, and service offerings.
Service admin Set up, create, edit, and delete services and service offerings.
Service editor Edit services and service offerings that they own or are a delegate of.
Service viewer View all service portfolios, services, and service offerings.

Service Portfolio Management workflow

Depending on your role, you can use Service Portfolio Management for a variety of use cases.

Figure 1. Service Portfolio Management overview
Service Portfolio Management overview.
  • Portfolio admins create service portfolios, services, and service offerings. Portfolio admins can also use the ServiceNow® Service Builder application to create and edit services and service offerings.
  • Portfolio editors and service editors create, add, and assign roles to service offerings. Portfolio editors and service editors can also log outages, assess availability commitment results, assess service level agreements (SLA) commitment results, and identify service impacts from dependencies.
  • Portfolio viewers and service viewers can view service portfolios, services, and service offerings in both Service Portfolio Management and in Service Builder.

Service Portfolio Management benefits

The Service Portfolio Management application provides several benefits to help you organize services and other solutions.

Table 2. Service Portfolio Management benefits
Benefit Feature Users
Create and manage service portfolios and add services and offerings to the portfolios. Create portfolios in Service Portfolio Management Portfolio admin
Create and manage the overall portfolio taxonomy, including service nodes. Service Portfolio Management taxonomy Portfolio admin
Create taxonomy nodes Create taxonomy nodes Portfolio admin
Create services Create a service in Service Portfolio Management Portfolio admin and service editor
Create service offerings, commitments, assign support teams to a service offering, and subscribe users. Service offerings in Service Portfolio Management

Portfolio admin to create service offerings.

Service editor to add commitments to an offering, assign multiple support teams, and subscribe users.
Log outages Log outages in Service Portfolio Management Service editor
View availability results View availability results in Service Portfolio Management All Service Portfolio Management roles
Set the time zone for availability results Set the time zone for availability results in Service Portfolio Management Portfolio admin
Integrates with the Common Service Data Model (CSDM) Applying the CSDM guidelines to Service Portfolio Management Admin

What to explore next

To learn more about configuring and using Service Portfolio Management, see:
  • Configuring Service Portfolio Management
  • Using Service Portfolio Management
  • Service Portfolio Management reference