Service Management Best Practices

Overview

A healthy portfolio maintains a productive balance across its lifecycle stages. A portfolio that is too heavily weighted toward Active services with nothing in the pipeline is a portfolio that is not investing in its future. A portfolio with a large pipeline but few Active services is not delivering adequate value today. A portfolio with many Deprecated services and a slow retirement process is accumulating complexity and cost that constrains its ability to invest in new capabilities.

Best Practice

Monitor and actively manage the distribution of services across lifecycle stages within each portfolio. Establish norms for healthy portfolio balance: what proportion of portfolio capacity should be devoted to operating Active services, what proportion to developing new services, and what proportion to managing the retirement of deprecated services. Use these norms as a diagnostic tool to identify portfolios that are imbalanced and as an input to portfolio investment decisions.

Benefit(s)

Portfolio balance management ensures that the service landscape evolves at a sustainable pace — delivering value today while building capability for tomorrow and retiring the past without letting it become a burden. Portfolios that maintain productive balance across lifecycle stages consistently deliver better customer outcomes and more efficient resource utilization than those that allow imbalance to develop and persist.