Exploring Service Portfolio Management

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

• 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

• Use Service Portfolio Management services
  Configure IT services within your portfolios to add the most value to your organization. The IT services defined in your portfolios may, or may not be, aligned to an application. IT services defined in your portfolios may, or may not be, represented in a request catalog.
• Service Portfolio Management portfolios
  A service portfolio presents an overall top-level view of your currently available services, possible future services, and services that existed in the past. Evaluate the impact that services have on your business and manage them in a single portfolio or multiple portfolios with unique taxonomy structures, owners, and market scope.