Service Management Best Practices

Overview

A portfolio without an accountable owner is a portfolio managed by committee, by convention, or by nobody. Committee management produces slow decisions and diffuse accountability. Convention-based management works until the people who know the conventions leave. Management by nobody produces a portfolio that drifts toward disorder. Every portfolio needs a specific individual who is personally accountable for its health and strategic direction.

Best Practice

Assign a named Portfolio Owner to every portfolio in the organization. The Portfolio Owner is accountable for the strategic health of the portfolio as a whole: ensuring portfolio composition reflects organizational priorities, managing portfolio-level investment, identifying and addressing gaps and overlaps within the portfolio, and reporting portfolio health and performance to appropriate leadership. The Portfolio Owner is distinct from the individual Service Owners within the portfolio — they govern the portfolio as a collection, not the individual services within it.

Benefit(s)

Named Portfolio Owner accountability transforms portfolio management from a passive cataloging exercise into an active strategic discipline. The portfolio evolves in response to organizational priorities because there is a specific person whose job it is to drive that evolution. Gaps are identified and addressed because there is a specific person looking at the portfolio as a whole rather than at individual services in isolation. Leadership has a direct accountability relationship with the portfolio rather than a diffuse relationship with a committee.