Application Portfolio Management (APM) Best Practices

Overview

Services are typically governed by Service Level Agreements that define availability, performance, and support commitments to the customers and internal users who depend on them. The applications that deliver those services have their own operational characteristics - their actual availability records, their technical debt burden, their vendor support terms, and their operational support model. When application SLAs are not explicitly aligned with the service SLAs they underpin, service level commitments are made without verifying that the applications enabling the service are operationally capable of supporting the committed service level. The result is service SLAs that cannot be reliably met because they are not grounded in the operational reality of the applications that deliver the service.

Best Practice

For every service in the Service Catalog that has a formal SLA, verify that the application or applications that primarily enable that service have operational characteristics consistent with supporting the committed service level. Review application availability records against service availability commitments. Assess whether technical debt and EOL risk in the enabling applications create operational fragility that threatens the service level commitment. Verify that vendor support terms for key application components are consistent with the response time and resolution time commitments in the service SLA. Where gaps are identified between application operational characteristics and service SLA commitments, address them through investment in the enabling applications or adjustment of the service SLA to commitments that the current application portfolio can reliably support.

Benefit(s)

Aligning application SLAs with the service SLAs they underpin ensures that service level commitments are grounded in the operational reality of the technology that delivers them rather than in aspirational targets that the current portfolio cannot reliably support. Service level failures that result from application limitations rather than operational failures become visible before they become customer-affecting incidents. Investment in application reliability and technical debt remediation is informed by specific, quantified service level implications that make the business case for remediation investment concrete and defensible to the financial stakeholders who must approve it.