Capacity Management


Capacity Management ensure the punctual and economic fulfillment of the agreed capacity requirements for IT services.

Scope

Capacity Management provides the following deliverables:

  • Creation and maintenance of suitable capacity plans
  • Consult and guide other roles and functions for capacity policies and -performance
  • Ensure that the service performance reaches or exceeds agreed service levels.
  • Support of Incident Management and Problem Management, as missing capacities might cause service interruptions
  • Support the evaluation of changes, e.g. for hardware adjustments 
  • Ensure reasonable and pro-active service improvements

Activities

There are multiple activities for Capacity Management, which all correlated to the Capacity Managment Information System, the central repository for capacity related data:

  • Cyclic
    • Capacity Reviews
    • Identification of potentials for improvements
    • Identification of requirements
    • Plan new capacities
  • On-going
    • Monitoring of current capacities
    • Analysis of capacities (e.g. preventively for a marketing event)
    • Tuning of given capacities (via Change Management)
    • Providing of capacities
  • Ad-Hoc
    • Modelling, e.g. an increasement from 80 to 8’000 users
    • Application sizing, e.g. required hardware requirements for 50 vs 500 users
    • Demand Management, e.g. simulation for demand planning 

Critical Success Factors

The following items are examples:

  • CSF: Accurate business forecasts
    • KPI: In-time delivery of capacity forecasts
    • KPI: Reduction of deviations between business plans and capacity plans
  • CSF: Knowledge about current and future technology
    • KPI: Reduction of utilization of outdated technologies
    • KPI: Completeness of measures
  • CSF: Ability to pin-point out the profitabillity
    • KPI: Reduction of panic buying
    • Reduction of excess capacities
  • CSF: Ability to plan and implement suitable capacities
    • KPI: Reduction of capacity- or performancerelated incidents