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Capacity Management

B4

Plan and manage technical service capacity to meet business demands in an agile way.

Improvement Planning

Practices-Outcomes-Metrics (POM)

Representative POMs are described for Capacity Management at each level of maturity.

2Basic
  • Practices
    • Establish a basic technical service capacity forecasting ability in parts of the IT organization.
    • Track capacity utilization, and focus capacity planning on high value items (e.g. high cost licences, server, storage, memory, or network needs), and on projected service requirements.
    Outcomes
    • More accurate planning provides an improved IT service performance.
    • Adequate resources are available to ensure performance at the minimum required service level.
    Metrics
    • IT service utilization levels.
    • Cost variance from planned service cost.
    • Service downtime hours.
    • # of service desk calls.
3Intermediate
  • Practices
    • Size technical service capacity to match demand for IT services.
    • Prioritize investments based on mapping business capacity to technical capacity, and list capacity constraints in business terms.
    Outcomes
    • There is well-defined forecasting of technical service capacity and availability, with generally reliable results.
    • Agreed service levels are typically maintained in the event of a major loss of service.
    Metrics
    • IT service utilization levels.
    • Customer satisfaction ratings in relation to IT service provision.
    • Performance to SLA service targets.
  • Practice
    Bring down the cost per service to equal or better industry benchmarks.
    Outcome
    Improving the cost per service results in improved asset utilization and reduced cost to service users without needing to purchase any unnecessary additional capacity.
    Metrics
    • Cost variance from planned service cost.
    • IT service cost per user vs. industry benchmark.
    • IT service utilization levels.
4Advanced
  • Practice
    Carry out capacity planning for current and future business needs in an agile way that efficiently matches business demand swings, and assess recommendations on opportunities to influence the demand for capacity.
    Outcome
    Capacity can be flexibly aligned with changes in business demand.
    Metrics
    • IT service utilization levels.
    • Customer satisfaction ratings in relation to IT service provision.
    • Performance to SLA service targets.
    • Business process performance impact of service investment (e.g. additional process capacity reduces cycle times).
  • Practices
    • Review patterns of business activity in order to predict capacity requirements.
    • Collect the data and develop procedures to enable predictive analysis that can quantify the cost of achieving specific business process performance levels.
    • Such analysis could include modelling techniques and scenario planning/rightsizing/growth planning).
    Outcome
    Capacity is aligned with business activity and further capacity can be released in line with budget cycles (prior to budget decisions), which can help to make the case for appropriate investment.
    Metrics
    • Transactions handled per unit of cost.
    • IT service utilization levels.
    • Customer satisfaction ratings in relation to IT service provision.
    • Performance to SLA service targets.
    • Business process performance impact of service investment (e.g. additional process capacity reduces cycle times).
  • Practice
    Define which resources support which services and what technical skills are available, and tune activities to make the most efficient use of current resources — for example, through the elimination of waste and the promotion of ‘green IT’ practices, or through the use of on-demand services to improve available capacity.
    Outcome
    An understanding of which resources support which services and the technical skills that are available helps to target cost-justifiable investments in areas where making business process capacity available can have the greatest impact.
    Metrics
    • Business process impact (e.g. business process hours lost from SLA breaches).
    • Number of business process transactions (or hours) lost due to IT service/component failure.
5Optimized
  • Practices
    • Use organization-level scenario planning models to identify IT-enabled opportunities for strategic change.
    • Identify the impact of new business strategies on IT in order to manage risk more effectively.
    Outcomes
    • Proactive use of predictive models allows for increased confidence in IT service resilience and in building availability management.
    • Models can help by identifying, for example, opportunities to reduce complexity in service architecture and to promote modular design for flexibility.
    Metrics
    • IT capacity plan vs. actual.
    • # of IT capacity management exception reports.
    • IT service utilization levels.
    • Performance to SLA service targets.
  • Practice
    Schedule regular availability testing and ensure the availability plan is reviewed and tested after any major service change.
    Outcomes
    • Testing will confirm if the current availability is achievable and appropriately resilient.
    • Any corrective and preventive actions identified and acted upon will proactively achieve improved levels of service reliability.
    Metrics
    • IT service availability variance (actual vs. planned).
    • IT service utilization levels.
    • Performance to SLA service targets.