Stop Just Managing Capacity by Moving to a Capacity-as-a-Service Strategy
Capacity planning is a skill that all infrastructure professionals need to develop.
- There is a lack of understanding of the appropriate metrics to effectively manage capacity.
- There is a lack of analytical tools to start managing and planning capacity.
- Capacity management requires time and analytical skills.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- End users and stakeholders lack the ability to provide the correct information to identify current issues or future needs.
- Organizational demands change so quickly that it’s difficult to forecast resource requirements accurately.
- Start simple. Start with the monitoring data that is already gathered as part of normal routines.
- Build intuitive metrics. When using Excel and simple monitoring data, stick with metrics such as percent utilization.
- Know when to stop using Excel. If you need a Hadoop instance to handle the data, consider capacity management tools.
Impact and Result
- Create a service-oriented capacity management and planning strategy that will meet changing business needs.
- Adopt ITIL and COBIT frameworks to reduce the process and metric planning. Allow infrastructure managers to focus on developing the analytical skills and data gathering processes.
- Align the capacity management with critical IT services; focus on those resources that enable key services.
Workshop: Stop Just Managing Capacity by Moving to a Capacity-as-a-Service Strategy
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Introduction to Capacity Planning Concepts
The Purpose
- Provide a basic understanding of capacity planning as an IT skill.
- Identification of the relevant sections of COBIT and ITIL.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Understanding of the role capacity planning plays in infrastructure tasks.
- Providing a scope for the capacity management and planning project.
Activities
Outputs
Define the role of capacity management in infrastructure day-to-day activities.
Define the relevant COBIT and ITIL modules.
- Understand the core concepts of ITIL and COBIT as they apply to capacity management.
Understand the difference and benefits of capacity management versus capacity planning.
- Define the positive improvements possible by adopting capacity planning best practices.
Module 2: Determine the Services that IT Provides
The Purpose
- Re-orientate infrastructure from a commodity view to a service view.
- Identify IT resources that IT provides to the business.
- Align the IT resources with IT services.
Key Benefits Achieved
- An understanding of resource usage based on business needs.
- A starting point for rationalizing IT resources with capacity management needs.
Activities
Outputs
Define critical IT services.
- Prioritized list of IT services.
Define the critical resources for those services.
- A list of resources associated with each IT service.
Relate services with business priorities.
Module 3: Relate Business Needs to Applications
The Purpose
- Separate high priority capacity management issues from application or vendor management issues.
- Prioritize those capacity issues that IT can manage and fix.
Key Benefits Achieved
- A starting point for capacity management.
- An understanding of the relationship between application and infrastructure pieces.
Activities
Outputs
Build a detailed description of each resource required for the top three IT services.
- A map of resource dependencies based on the IT services.
Map dependencies for each IT service.
- A set of KPIs based on measurements that IT is already using for day-to-day operations.
Define KPIs for capacity management.
- A prioritized list of infrastructure resources for capacity management.
Module 4: Design Potential Pools of Resources to Manage Capacity
The Purpose
- Build a plan for implementing the capacity management and planning plan.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Provide a starting point for measuring and understanding the organization’s capacity.
- Aligning capacity planning with ongoing infrastructure projects.
Activities
Outputs
Analyze historic utilization of resources to determine the peak and spare capacity.
- A project plan for communicating with IT and external stakeholders.
Design a long-term plan to reduce service interruptions.
- Identification of a shortlist of related projects that should be part of the capacity management plan.
About Info-Tech
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We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 1-phase advisory process. You'll receive 5 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
- Call 1: Assess capacity planning readiness
The most difficult part of capacity planning is defining the IT goals for better capacity planning. The GI calls for this section are designed to ensure that you have the engagement and tools in place to succeed.
- Call 2: Plan capacity management needs
Defining the relationship between what the business needs and what IT provides is critical to success. Let Info-Tech help you match the business needs to IT services by using our tools and best practice knowledge.
- Call 3: Evaluate the dependencies and metrics
Moving from planning to executing a capacity-as-a-service project means metric development. The GI calls for this section are designed to ensure that the metrics that you use are flexible enough to provide an intuitive visualization so that you can focus on key problems without deep analysis of a whole service.
- Call 4: Refine the resource management plan
The maturation of the capacity-as-a-service project requires the expansion from a limited pool tied to a service to a larger infrastructure-wide plan. Let Info-Tech review your plan and help you integrate other key tools into the long-term plan.
- Call 5: Determine the need for capacity planning tools
Excel and hard work will only get you so far. Use these GI calls to evaluate the need for deeper analysis than what can be provided by Excel alone.
Manage Your Capacity to Increase Your Availability
