Service Management Best Practices

Overview

Individual service investment decisions made in isolation can collectively produce a portfolio that is over-invested in low-value services and under-invested in high-value ones. Without portfolio-level investment visibility, it is impossible to make informed trade-off decisions about where to allocate scarce organizational resources across the service landscape.

Best Practice

Manage investment at the portfolio level, not just the individual service level. Maintain visibility into the total investment required to operate and improve each portfolio, the value that investment generates for customers and the organization, and the distribution of investment across the portfolio’s services. Use this visibility to make informed decisions about portfolio investment allocation — increasing investment in high-value services, reducing it in low-value services, and identifying opportunities to achieve more value with the same investment through consolidation or redesign.

Benefit(s)

Portfolio-level investment management produces a service landscape that efficiently allocates organizational resources toward the highest customer value. Investment decisions are made in the context of the full portfolio rather than in isolation. Trade-offs are visible and defensible. The portfolio delivers more value per unit of investment over time because resources are continuously redirected from lower-value to higher-value activities.