Service offerings in Service Portfolio Management

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
    • Summarize
    Summarized using AI
    This content was generated using new OpenAI-powered functionality. Results are provided on an as is basis and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete.

    Summary of Service offerings in Service Portfolio Management

    Service offerings in Service Portfolio Management refine parent services to address specific business needs and performance levels. They define different performance tiers for a service, such as standard and executive desktop support offerings. Each service must have at least one offering before progressing to the Catalog phase, as offerings are where Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and performance metrics are established and tracked.

    Show full answer Show less

    Key Features

    • Service Offering Types: Includes business service offerings and technical service offerings (labeled Technology Management Service from the Zurich release onward).
    • Service Level Agreements: SLAs and metrics are defined and monitored at the service offering level.
    • Pricing Models: Each offering can have its own pricing model and price unit, which supports catalog item creation and pricing transparency.
    • Subscriptions: Entities such as users, companies, groups, and departments can subscribe to service offerings, enabling accurate subscriber counts.
    • Technical Service Offerings: These can be linked as inherited relationships to business services but do not participate in metric models or weighting.
    • Re-parenting: Offerings can be re-parented between business and technical service types under certain conditions, with system alerts guiding adjustments needed for metrics and weighting before changes.
    • Team Assignments: Multiple teams can support a single service offering when responsibilities are shared.
    • Catalog Items: Service owners and subscribers can create or relate catalog items to service offerings, regardless of offering phase or status.
    • Reporting: Service and offering performance can be monitored and reported within Service Portfolio Management using related lists.
    • Premium Notifications: Enhanced notifications help manage relationships between service offerings and catalog items.

    Key Outcomes

    By leveraging service offerings in Service Portfolio Management, organizations can:

    • Precisely define and differentiate service levels to meet various business needs.
    • Establish and monitor SLAs and performance metrics at a granular level.
    • Apply tailored pricing for each offering to align with business models and customer expectations.
    • Manage subscriptions effectively to understand usage and demand.
    • Organize support responsibilities clearly across multiple teams.
    • Maintain flexibility in service portfolio structure through controlled re-parenting of offerings.
    • Integrate service offerings seamlessly with the Service Catalog to enable ordering and fulfillment.
    • Access detailed reporting to inform decision-making and service improvement initiatives.

    A service offering derives from a service, refining the parent service to a specific business need and performance level.

    Service offerings and commitments

    Offering records define different levels of performance for an existing service. For example, you might offer two levels of desktop support in your organization. You can offer a standard offering for upgrades and virus protection and an executive offering that also includes availability guarantee.

    Service offering types include business service offerings and technical service offerings.
    Important:
    For the Zurich release and later, the label for the items in the [cmdb_ci_service_technical] table is Technology Management Service, respectively. Prior to the Zurich release, the label is Technical Service.

    Create a complete set of service offerings defined by commitments that define the specifics of the offering. Each service must have at least one defined offering to move to the Catalog phase. This is because service offerings are where you define Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and where metrics are collated.

    For detailed information about SLAs, including SLA definitions and results, refer to Service Level Management.

    Service offering pricing

    Each service offering may have a pricing model and a price unit. Use this pricing data towards creating catalog items.

    Service offering subscriptions

    You can subscribe different entities to a service offering. This data is then used to determine the total subscriber count on the offering form.

    Technical service offerings

    Technical service offerings can be shown as inherited relationships to business services and offerings. They are not included in metric models and do not use the weighting model.

    Re-parenting service offering types

    You can change a service offering parent from one type of service to another. For example, changing an offering parent from a business service to a technical service or vice versa. Offerings cannot be re-parented to an application service. Some important information and guidelines concerning re-parenting service offering types, include:
    • When you change the offering parent from a business service to a technical service you will receive a message alerting you that performance scoring is not available with technical service offerings.
    • When you re-parent from one service type to another, existing weighting rules will apply.
    • If you try to re-parent and the parent service is in Catalog phase with only one offering, you will receive a message that you cannot make this change.
    • If the metric weight on the parent service is >0, you will receive a message alerting you to adjust the data before re-parenting the offering. You cannot re-parent the offering to a different service type until the weight for the offering on the former service type is set to zero.

    Service offering topics in this section