Investment Scenario Planning
Understand existing capacity and identify the need for additional/new IT infrastructure to support growth of business processes.
Improvement Planning
Practices-Outcomes-Metrics (POM)
Representative POMs are described for Investment Scenario Planning at each level of maturity.
- 1Initial
- Practice
- Use percentage mappings as an approximate until procedures are developed i.e. if business volume increases 25%; increase IT by 25%.
- 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
- Quickly count the IT resources and divide by business operational measures like volume, variety, complexity, etc.
- Measure IT resources in business terms like % cost per unit or transaction.
- Begin mapping mapping IT resources to business operational metrics.
- Outcomes
- The unit cost of IT is understood and industry comparisons become possible.
- A high level understanding emerges e.g. putting an extra 4-servers will allow an extra 50% volume throughput and reduce response times to sub-2-seconds.
- Metric
- Business measures per IT resources, utilized, spare capacity, lead-time to increasedecrease.
- 3Intermediate
- Practice
- Undertake scenario planning using the IT Services model, identifying additional IT infrastructure requirements due to likely risk/change scenarios .
- 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
- Practices
- Do capacity planning (including 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
- Base decision making process on the outputs of scenario planning activities.
- Outcomes
- Increased confidence in model
- Improved capability to optimize IT
- Metrics
- Variance (actual vs planned)
- ROI (per IT dollar)