Today Jack Probst presented to the itSMF Higher Education Special Interest Group (SIG). The presentation is to be posted on the SIG web site. The CMDB and the service catalog are very closely related. The CMDB starts with services anyways, and the service catalog is the list of services. Potential service catalog categories:

• Application Based Services (e.g. Customer Support Services)
• Hosting Services (e.g. Data Center services)
• Desktop Services (e.g. mobile devices)
• Shared Services (e.g. data LAN)
• IT Professional Services (e.g. Service Management, Procurement)

The itSMF Special Interest Group (SIG) for Higher Education is going to have its next event, June 17. It doesn't look like the SIG's web site is updated yet, so here are the details:

Speaker
Jack Probst, Principal Consultant, Pink Elephant

WHEN:
Wednesday, June 17th, 1:00-2:00 pm EDT

COST:
Free

REGISTRATION

Cross-posted to http://www.educause.edu/blog/borwick/SummaryProjectPrioritizationMa/173007.

Randall Alberts, head of the Project Management Office at Georgia State University, gave a presentation called "Project Prioritization Made Easy."

Their organization has 185 IT employees and 3 project managers including Randall. These three support project management in IT but do not manage all projects.

We just posted two additional templates on the site:

• Technology Evaluation Form, posted under Service Portfolio Management. We use this form to evaluate a technology request to determine high-level risks.
• Service Acceptance Criteria, posted under Change Management. We use this template as a checklist to go through before any significant service modification goes live.

Predecessors/Before You Begin

"Service Portfolio Management" is not dissimilar from Project Portfolio Management or Program Management, project management terms. However, Service Portfolio Management manages the "new stuff" and existing services.

Service Portfolio Management

Service Portfolio Management is the ITIL Service Strategy process concerned with managing new, current, and retired services. The Service Portfolio Manager balances the three components of the service catalog:

The itSMF USA Higher Education SIG is holding its first meeting today. We are attending virtually.

David Cannon, one of the authors of Service Operation, presented on "ITSM on a Shoestring."

He talked about how IT cost cutting can be misdirected, such as how IT shops are now running into "virtualization sprawl" from virtualizing servers for immediate cost without considering the longer-term costs of managing virtual machines' configuration.

CIO magazine has a downloadable white paper called "Understanding ITIL Service Portfolio Management" available on their site. The article, written by BMC, talks about the importance of tying services to the business, and provides a brief summary of a couple of Service Strategy and Service Design concepts.