Service management and project management are closely related to each other in the following ways.

Project management in service management

Both service management and project management have the same strategic goal: maximize value for the business. Service management provides a method for governing “investments,” and “projects” are also “investments.” In other words, project management is another service offering in service management.

Service management in project management

Many projects, especially software or IT projects, involve various types of integration and systems testing, alpha testing and beta testing. During these testing, incident management, issue management, configuration management and change management disciplines are needed. As a matter of fact, configuration and change management are often needed even during the requirements, design and construction phases of a project.

How service and project management (Service Mgt.+BPM) work together

Service Mgt + BPM can be used in both the project management in service management and service management in project management scenarios.

Change management

When a service is out of step with business expectations, it must be modified, expanded or otherwise altered. IT must determine how these changes will affect the service deployment, implement them appropriately, and then monitor if the changes have the intended effect. Release management can be grouped with change management or treated as a separate process.

Asset management

Services require software and hardware assets to function. These assets should be tracked, updated appropriately and mapped to show how they interact. Configuration management, capacity management and asset management deal with these concerns and can mix or separate processes.

Project management

IT services transition between various stages of the lifecycle at different times and different speeds. Project management skills enable IT organizations to maintain orderly services and avoid issues such as outdated systems or shadow IT.

Knowledge management

Knowledge management crosses into the other Service Mgt processes, and is a way to avoid duplicated work and to discover by organizing and providing information about IT services.

Incident management

When an IT service is disrupted by performance issues or an outage, the IT service desk must address the issue, restore service availability and make improvements and codify procedures to prevent reoccurrence.

Issue management

An issue is the root cause of an incident. An IT organization might remediate an incident but not fix the issue, leading to future incidents. Therefore, issue management is a way to permanently fix issues to improve service delivery and performance.

Benefits of integrated Service Mgt+BPM

Deploying Service Mgt + BPM would have the following benefits:

• Ability to have a comprehensive list of services, including projects to change these services, create new services, or disable services;
• Ability to provide complete transparency of all services (e.g., able to see requirement cost, design cost, construction cost, testing cost and support cost such as bug-fix cost.)
• Ability to provide consistent management and tracking mechanisms for all services, which will lead to better strategic planning for the organization as well as more accurate cost management;
• Ability to better understand when specific services need to be added and others can be retired;
• Ability to view and manage capacity of all resources across all IT work;
• Ability to better manage overall requirements and an on-going forecast.