Service Management Best Practices

Overview

A single undifferentiated list of all organizational services is manageable when the portfolio is small. As the portfolio grows, a flat list becomes difficult to navigate, difficult to govern, and difficult to align with organizational strategy. Different service areas have different customers, different owners, different strategic priorities, and different governance requirements. Managing them as an undifferentiated whole produces governance that is either too coarse to be meaningful or too complex to be practical.

Best Practice

Organize services into portfolios that reflect natural service area and ownership boundaries. A portfolio is a logical collection of related services that share a common service domain, a common customer population, or a common ownership structure. Examples include an HR Services Portfolio, an IT Infrastructure Services Portfolio, and a Security Services Portfolio. Each portfolio has a named Portfolio Owner accountable for its strategic health, a defined scope, and a governance process appropriate to its size and complexity.

Benefit(s)

Portfolio organization produces a service landscape that is navigable, governable, and strategically manageable at scale. Portfolio Owners can develop deep expertise in their domain and govern their services with the context and authority that generalist oversight cannot provide. Strategic alignment is easier to achieve and maintain because portfolios correspond to organizational domains with natural strategic coherence. Customers benefit from a service landscape that is organized in a way that reflects how the organization actually works.