Capacity Trend Analysis
Size the infrastructure based on current and expected business demand — for example, by examining current performance trends or deducing expected capacity needs from the business strategy.
Improvement Planning
Practices-Outcomes-Metrics (POM)
Representative POMs are described for Capacity Trend Analysis at each level of maturity.
- 1Initial
- Practice
- Use percentage business volume changes to estimate IT changes.
- Outcome
- Reactive environment with minimal predictability and poor corrective actions, leading to budget overruns and/or over-investment (“sledgehammer to crack a nut”).
- Metrics
- Number of outages
- Total downtime
- Variance from planned BAU cost
- Helpdesk calls
- MTTR
- 2Basic
- Practices
- Track capacity utilization to maintain agreed level of headroom.
- Base future capacity planning on projected business requirements
- Outcome
- Improved IT performance as a consequence of minimising recurring IT issues.
- Metrics
- Number of incidents per issue-type
- Number of incidents per category
- MTBF
- 3Intermediate
- Practice
- Size IT infrastructure to match demand for IT services, facilitating prioritisation of investments/disinvestments based on demand, and pushing down cost per service to equal/better industry benchmarks.
- Outcomes
- Capacity Planning:
- Improved IT-Business alignment
- Improved ROI
- Optimized cost per service
- Scenario Planning:
- Improved IT-Business planning
- Reduction in risk
- Improved business continuity plans
- Example CP: Where should we best target part of our IT budget in order to accommodate 1200 users?
- Example SP: Are our remote access services capable of handling a predicted increase in usage brought about by and outbreak of avian flu?
- Metrics
- Capacity Planning:
- ROI
- IT service cost per user
- IT asset utilization
- Stakeholder satisfaction
- Adoption of IT service metrics by the business
- IT service metrics
- Storage requirements per service user (trended)
- CPU requirements per service user (trended)
- Bandwidth requirements
- Scenario Planning:
- Original predicted impact of incident vs Predicted impact following implementation of new contingency plans
- Number of times a risk threshold is broken
- 4Advanced
- Practice
- Dooe capacity planning (inc. scenario planning/rightsizing/growth planning) quantify IT cost of achieving specific business process performance levels (or business cost of failing to meet agreed performance levels), facilitating appropriate prioritisation.
- Outcomes
- Improved basis for prioritisation of investments
- Optimal level of investment in order to achieve target business performance levels (as opposed to excessive overinvestment or under-investment)
- Potential to manage risk more effectively
- Continuous improvement in IT service levels
- Target IT investments and effort in areas where the greatest impact can be made in terms of business process capacity
- NOTE: This insight can also be helpful in managing change from a legacy application to a new application solution (identifying bottlenecks in its adoption).
- Metrics
- Transactions handled per IT dollar
- IT SLAs breached
- Business process SLAs breached
- Business process impact (eg additional process capacity) of service investment
- Business process impact (eg business process hours lost from SLA breaches (ie no investment)
- Transactions handled per IT dollar
- Number of business process transactions (or hours) lost due to IT service/component failure
- 5Optimized
- Practice
- Use of organization-level scenario planning model to identify IT-derived opportunities for strategic change, to identify impact of new business strategies on IT, and to manage risk more effectively.
- Outcomes
- Increased confidence in model
- Improved capability to optimize IT
- Metrics
- Variance (actual vs planned)
- ROI (per IT dollar)