Service Management Best Practices

Overview

Three related concepts define the full scope of an organization’s service landscape: the Service Catalog, the Service Portfolio, and the Service Pipeline. Each represents a different view of the organization’s services, and each serves a different organizational purpose. Organizations that do not clearly distinguish between these three concepts struggle to govern their services effectively because they conflate operational tools with strategic assets.

Best Practice

Establish clear definitions for all three concepts and ensure everyone involved in service governance, service ownership, or service delivery understands the distinctions. The Service Catalog is the customer-facing, requestable view of active services available today. The Service Portfolio is the complete strategic record of all services the organization manages — active, deprecated, retired, and in development. The Service Pipeline is the collection of proposed or in-development services that are not yet active — the organization’s service development roadmap.

Benefit(s)

Clear distinctions between the catalog, portfolio, and pipeline prevent scope creep, governance confusion, and customer frustration. Leaders can make better investment decisions because they have a clear picture of what exists today (catalog), what is planned for tomorrow (pipeline), and the full strategic landscape (portfolio). Governance bodies can apply the right level of oversight to each — operational governance to the catalog, strategic governance to the portfolio, development governance to the pipeline.