Get answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about DPM below:

Here’s what the covered:

• Overview
• Portfolios
• KPI Groups
• Workspace
• Integrations

Overview

Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) was released as a unified workspace in February 2021, that allows solution owners to holistically view and collectively manage their services, apps, and products through the entire plan, build, run, and optimize lifecycle. DPM unites Service Portfolio Management and Application Portfolio Management providing a view into performance and context of business applications, services, service offerings, etc.

How can I install Digital Portfolio Management

Digital Portfolio Management and some of the required plugins can be easily installed by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store.

Which licenses do I need to access Digital Portfolio Management?

DPM is available as a part of ITSM standard. It can also be added to any ITSM or SPM license that incorporates Service Portfolio Management or Application Portfolio Management.

What personas/roles does DPM cater to?

DPM was designed for Solution Owners and IT Managers responsible for the implementation and performance of services, apps, products etc. The roles that come with the product are: DPM Admin and DPM Manager.

How is the DPM homepage experience?

Digital Portfolio management allows Solution Owners to personalize their homepage experience to view the solutions they own and care about. Additionally, users can personalize the status conditions including the solution card attributes and thresholds. Owners can gain quick access to recently viewed pages in DPM, personal portfolios and enterprise portfolios.

Explore our Product Docs page for more information.

How do I differentiate between a Service and Service Offering?

Service: A service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes that customers want to achieve without owning the costs and risks.

Service Offerings: A service offering consists of one or more service commitments that uniquely define the level of service in terms of availability, scope, pricing, and packaging options. Customers can choose to receive different levels of performance and features for a given service through service offerings (typically made available as distinct items in the service catalog).

A service can have multiple service offerings (each made available as separate catalog items) with different service level agreements (SLAs).

Refer here for more details.

Where can I get guidance on CSDM?

Digital portfolio management aligns closely with Common Service Data Model (CSDM) framework for defining configuration items (CIs) and relationships between CIs. There are multiple terms used in DPM that have their basis in CSDM. Refer here for more information and guidance on CSDM. You can also refer to the CSDM community site here , product documentation here and a video for DPM and CSDM.

Do I need to have all the lifecycle phases - plan, build, run to start using DPM?

If your organization doesn't use certain modules or life-cycle phases in Digital Portfolio Management (DPM), then you can configure the experience by hiding those elements from user views. As a DPM admin, you can hide entire tabs, certain sections of a tab, and solution types (for example, business applications) from user views. Note that after a tab or solution type is hidden, that item is also hidden in searches and filters.For more information on configuring the DPM workspace please refer here.

Portfolios

What is a personal portfolio in DPM?

Personal portfolios contain data from services, offerings, business applications, and application services into one space for solution owners to view and report on. Solution owners can see how each item is progressing according to the assigned roadmap and evaluate its performance based on key performance indicators (KPIs) that interest them. With a DPM manager role [sn_dpm.dpm_manager], you can see the personal portfolios that you created and the portfolios that are shared with you. Solution owners don't have to own any of the items that they can pull in to create a personal portfolio.

What is an enterprise portfolio?

Enterprise Portfolios enable Solution owners to roll up key metrics through each level of the portfolio taxonomy. The service-type enterprise portfolios are created using Service Portfolio Management tables. Business application and application service portfolios are then created using enterprise portfolio tables. These portfolios are structured hierarchically and typically require admin setup for consistency across the organization. You can see the overall performance at the node and portfolio levels. Breakdowns of key metrics enable you to see which areas of the portfolio are contributing to good or poor performance.

How can Solution Owners use enterprise portfolios?

Solution owners can now create, browse, search, and select across portfolios the different types of solutions they own including business applications and application services. The enterprise portfolios have a modern, user-friendly display to view solution hierarchy, KPI metric details, and enable users to drill down to individual solution levels for specific details. For security and consistency purposes, the DPM manager role can view the enterprise portfolios, but only users with DPM admin role access can create, read, update, and delete new enterprise portfolios.

What are there three enterprise portfolio types? Do I need to create portfolios for each type?

You can work with three types of enterprise portfolios in the Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) application — service, business application, and application service. You can create service enterprise portfolio using Service Portfolio management. Enterprise portfolios for business applications and application service are created from enterprise portfolio table. There are no limitations on having to use one or the other type of portfolios, it is dependent on your organization’s needs. Check out this video for demo and more insights.

KPI Groups

What are KPI groups in DPM?

Solution Owners can define and configure the key performance indicator (KPI) groups in DPM that matter most. Associating KPI groups with your services and applications, can help you analyze their performance in a centralized area.

How can customers create KPI groups?

Solution owners can create KPI groups for enterprise portfolios and report on KPI metrics at each level of hierarchy for any type of solution in a portfolio. These solutions include business applications and application services, in addition to technical services and offerings.

You can refer this video for a deep-dive into KPI groups and how to troubleshoot them.

Which KPI groups do we get as part of the OOTB installation?

The DPM base system comes with KPI groups that provide valuable indicators to evaluate overall performance and individual metrics for services and other solutions. To see the list of the KPI groups installed with DPM, click here.

How can you configure pages to display the KPIs they are tracking?

Customers with DPM admin role can now streamline DPM setup and tailor views to match their usage needs. You can use system properties to configure pages as well as hide tabs and content sections in DPM without having to create custom pages in UI Builder. Configurations apply specifically to the service, offering, business app, and application service detail pages that have the plan, build, run, and risk tabs.

How do I see performance metrics in DPM?

We recommend mapping at least one KPI group to your top-level portfolios to see performance metrics. These indicators are automatically 'broken down' by portfolio/node/service/offering and let you see consistent metrics across your portfolio quickly. To learn more about KPI Groups and mapping, check out the documentation here.

Workspace

How is the information on each service or application organized?

Each service or app detail page is structured around lifecycle management in DPM. You can utilize plan, build, run and optimize structure to organize information. Service owners can see what their planning for, what's in progress right now, and how are things running. For business applications surfaced from Strategic Portfolio Management, risk metrics can also be tracked.

How are SLA commitments displayed in DPM?

Owners can review SLA commitment reporting on the Run tab for all SLA commitments on that offering (not just primary commitments).

What are the detail views in DPM?

Solution owners can view their service or application in a mapped dependency view with other services and applications. Side panels on the relationship map can display critical issues so you can view active critical incidents, outages, or alerts on the related services or applications displayed. This helps owners to understand upstream and downstream impacts effecting their services or applications and support proactive action to mitigate impacts.

How to configure the Needs Attention attributes?

The Needs attention content of DPM is configurable, allowing the admin to choose the types of records that users should be paying attention to. Examples include incidents, outages, and audits. Admins access the customizations by selecting All > Needs Attention > Needs Attention Attributes. For guidance on the values to be used please click here.

What is the time range on the Needs Attention records?

The time range for the records is 24 hours.

What are various ways to search in DPM?

The DPM workspace offers several search options including but not limited to records in personal portfolios, needs attention items, services, offerings, business applications, and application services. You can also search by name, owner, and all column fields of a record.

Integrations

Where can I get information about all the DPM-related products?

Digital Portfolio Management (DPM) enables you to use related applications to view and edit service details in the plan-build-run life cycle. All related applications are optional, so they aren't required to use the DPM experience. For complete details please refer this document.

How does DPM work with Application Portfolio Management ?

To surface features from Application Portfolio management in DPM, you need to have APM plugin installed along with the applicable licenses - Application Portfolio Management [com.snc.apm]. DPM incorporates app management, alerts, and risk features currently managed in APM. For users to see technical risk in DPM, they need to have this plugin installed: [sn_apm_tpm]. This plugin has two dependency plugins:

Application Portfolio Management [com.snc.apm] and Software Asset Management [com.snc.sams].

How does DPM work with Service Portfolio Management ?

DPM incorporates service creation, management, and portfolio creation currently created with Service Portfolio Manager and Service Builder. You can refer this video to see how to build a service using Service builder and view it in DPM.

How does DPM work with Alignment Planner Workspace?

DPM links service and application roadmaps to the solution-specific roadmap in Alignment Planner Workspace. For example, when viewing a business service detail page, the user can select the roadmap tile on the Plan and Build tabs which will launch the user into Alignment Planner Workspace and open that service’s roadmap. The same functionality exists for service offerings and business applications.

How is technology portfolio management (TPM) incorporated into DPM?

DPM integrates with TPM via Application Service [cmdb_ci_service_discovered] table and the corresponding business applications. This enables DPM to incorporate TPM’s latest technology portfolio management timeline view ​of business applications to track software shelf life and create a demand or a project to upgrade or retire them. The software models used in your business applications can be operating systems, database management systems, development tools, and middleware, each of which has a lifecycle. Tracking these lifecycle stages, manages common risks from vendors who may discontinue software support and the impact to business applications that run on those technologies. (TPM product docs) .

Note: This requires installation of the required plugins of APM.

What integrations with Process Mining are embedded in DPM?

DPM has added a Process Mining Analysis tab to enable IT managers to drill into KPI metrics being tracked in DPM. Customers will need to have the applicable licenses and the plugins to start using Process Mining. You will be able to gain insight into process outliers and bottlenecks behind KPI metrics by using the analysis tab.

How does DPM work with DevOps?

The integration and display of DevOps flow metrics provides solution owners data for value stream insights and gain visibility into the performance of solutions and where time is spent leveraging for data-based decisions. Displayed on the Build and Run tabs, solution owners can view DevOps flow metrics and KPIs including mean time to restore, change failure rate percentage and overtime, as well as navigate to the DevOps Insights dashboard. Customers can integrate their DevOps data into the full view of their application services in DPM and empower solution owners to make better planning decisions.

Refer to the DPM Toolkit Community Article Series to view more resources on DPM. Checkout the new DPM community hub and ask your questions in the DPM forum.

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