Service Management › IT Services Overview

IT Services Overview

IT services represent a collection of investments that can be analyzed for value and quality. IT services allow you to make informed financial decisions by viewing comparative data on your IT service cost and labor. You can share investments and services across other investments and services. Each child investment or service can have allocations that define how much a service is shared.

With IT services, you can:

• View an aggregation of financial and effort data to see, in real time, your service total cost of ownership
• Define the percentage value each child investment or service is allocated to the service
• Allocate a percentage value of the service to other services, investments, or ideas
• View the multilevel hierarchy of child investments that are associated with the service

IT services consist of the following components:

• Properties. Use the Properties menu to define the investment, from its name and schedule to baselines that capture snapshots at various stages in the investment lifecycle. In addition, you can define budget information and enable the investment for financial transactions.
• Team. Use the Team menu to build a team for the investment. A team consists of staff which performs the work and participants who assist the staff by providing information, suggestions, and concerns. But the participants do not perform any work directly related to the investment.
• Financial Plans. A financial plan is a tool that helps managers estimate and predict future cost requirements. Financial planning tools allow managers to model in detail where cost or revenues for a specific period occur. The tools also enable them to create the budget most suitable for their business needs.

  Finance managers set up defaults that define how financial plans can be created and the financial time periods used. The investment managers create multiple financial cost plans as estimates for a budget. They can submit the most appropriate cost plan for approval as a budget. Finance managers approve the submitted cost plans.

  The investment financial planning pages shows bottom up aggregation of the plan and the line item plan details from child investments.

  For more information, see the Financial Management User Guide.

• Hierarchies. Use the Hierarchy tab to view and manage parent and child relationships with other investments. With a hierarchy, you can view the financial rollup and effort rollup.
• Processes. Use Processes to view initiated processes or create them. For example, you can create a process that notifies the managers when the status of an investment changes to "Approved." You can also define a process to do actions, such as changing the progress to "Completed."

  Your CA Clarity PPM administrator can define service type-specific processes—or global processes designed to work on a specific service—from the Administration Tool. Use the Processes: Initiated page to create and run processes on services.

  For more information, see the Administration Guide.

• Audit. Audit trail keeps a historical record of all changes, additions, and deletions that occurs to specified investment fields. Use the Audit menu to view a log of change, addition, or deletion records for any of the fields chosen for auditing.

  The Audit menu appears only if it is set up your CA Clarity PPM administrator and if you have the appropriate access rights. The CA Clarity PPM administrator also determines the fields audited and what information is stored in the audit trail.

  For more information, see the Basics User Guide.