Service Portfolio Management (SPM) and LiveTime
The Service Portfolio details the commitments and investments made by a Service Provider to its customers and within the markets they service. It contains current contractual obligations, services under development and continuing service improvement programs.
The Portfolio represents all engaged resources and resources being released during the different phases of the Service Lifecycle. It includes the Service Pipeline that consists of services under development and the Service Catalog, which includes customer visible active services that have the potential to recover costs or earn profits for the Services provided.
Service Portfolio Management is a dynamic and ongoing process that covers the following stages in work practices:
- Define – list services, confirm business cases and verify portfolio data
- Analyze – maximize portfolio value, set priorities
- Approve – finalize portfolio proposal, authorize services and resources
- Charter – communicate decision and allocate resources.
LiveTime Service Manager 6.0 includes ITIL certified Service Portfolio Management, with Service Pipeline and Service Catalog functionality, as part of its base product. Combining the Service Item Lifecycle stored in the embedded CMDB, with assigned Service Level Agreements and service Teams, LiveTime enables organizations to manage their Service Offerings from strategy to design through to transition, operation and retirement.
Service Portfolio Management in LiveTime allows organizations to create Service Categories that include business-related attributes, such as business processes supported, business owners and business users. This ensures organizations record all relevant information against the Service.
Organizations can further optimize their Service Portfolio Management by tracking and reporting on Service Offering and Service Component usage, Service Level performance and costs. This includes the ability to calculate break-even points (B.E.P.) for a service, which allows support organizations to charge the appropriate cost for offering the service to their internal or external customers. This is achieved by recording of financial attributes against services, including service cost, service charges and service revenue.
LiveTime SPM capability also allows organizations to easily record the technical aspects of services such as applications used, IT Owners, supporting services, dependent services, SLAs and OLAs, Contracts and Agreements by defining Relationship Maps.
For further details regarding this functionality, please refer to the Service Portfolio Management link included in the Configuration Management section of the Service Manager User Guide.