Service offerings in Service Portfolio Management
Summarize
Summary of Service offerings in Service Portfolio Management
Service offerings in Service Portfolio Management represent specific refinements of parent services tailored to distinct business needs and performance levels. Each offering defines commitments such as Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and performance metrics. A service must have at least one defined offering to progress to the Catalog phase, emphasizing the importance of service offerings in managing service delivery and customer expectations.
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Key Features
- Service Offering Types: Includes business service offerings and technical service offerings. Technical offerings are linked as inherited relationships to business services but are excluded from metric models and performance weighting.
- Commitments: Service offerings include commitments that specify availability guarantees, scope, and pricing, which are essential for defining SLAs and tracking service performance.
- Pricing: Each service offering can have an individual pricing model and price unit, inherited from the parent service, allowing precise cost management and catalog item creation.
- Subscriptions: Users and organizational entities (companies, locations, groups, departments) can subscribe to service offerings, enabling subscription tracking and catalog ordering.
- Re-parenting Service Offering Types: Offerings can be re-parented between business and technical services under certain conditions, with warnings about performance scoring limitations and metric weighting adjustments required before re-parenting.
- Multi-team Support: Multiple teams can be assigned to support a single service offering, reflecting shared responsibilities.
- Catalog Integration: Service owners or subscribers can create or relate catalog items to service offerings regardless of their phase or status.
- Reporting: Service Portfolio Management provides reporting capabilities to monitor and analyze the impact and performance of services and their offerings.
Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers
By defining and managing service offerings within Service Portfolio Management, customers can:
- Tailor services to specific business needs with clear performance commitments and SLAs.
- Manage pricing and subscription data to facilitate accurate billing and service catalog management.
- Assign appropriate support teams to ensure service accountability and operational efficiency.
- Track service performance in real time and generate reports to inform continuous improvement.
- Maintain flexibility by re-parenting offerings between service types while managing the impact on performance metrics.
This structured approach enables organizations to deliver differentiated service levels, improve customer satisfaction, and maintain clear governance over service commitments and costs.
A service offering derives from a service, refining the parent service to a specific business need and performance level.
Service offerings and commitments
Offering records define different levels of performance for an existing service. For example, you might offer two levels of desktop support in your organization. You can offer a standard offering for upgrades and virus protection and an executive offering that also includes availability guarantee.
Service offering types include business service offerings and technical service offerings.
Create a complete set of service offerings defined by commitments that define the specifics of the offering. Each service must have at least one defined offering to move to the Catalog phase. This is because service offerings are where you define Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and where metrics are collated.
For detailed information about SLAs, including SLA definitions and results, refer to Service Level Management.
Service offering pricing
Each service offering may have a pricing model and a price unit. Use this pricing data towards creating catalog items.
Service offering subscriptions
You can subscribe different entities to a service offering. This data is then used to determine the total subscriber count on the offering form.
Technical service offerings
Technical service offerings can be shown as inherited relationships to business services and offerings. They are not included in metric models and do not use the weighting model.
Re-parenting service offering types
- When you change the offering parent from a business service to a technical service you will receive a message alerting you that performance scoring is not available with technical service offerings.
- When you re-parent from one service type to another, existing weighting rules will apply.
- If you try to re-parent and the parent service is in Catalog phase with only one offering, you will receive a message that you cannot make this change.
- If the metric weight on the parent service is >0, you will receive a message alerting you to adjust the data before re-parenting the offering. You cannot re-parent the offering to a different service type until the weight for the offering on the former service type is set to zero.