Do people look at you weird when you mention Capacity Management?

Many times there is difficulty in providing the “Elevator Pitch” when describing what that term means.  It’s easier for some.  When I was a younger man, filled with post-Business School enthusiasm, remembering the advice that I should show an interest in a client or prospect’s business, I asked an officer of Air Force Global Strike Command what his part of the military actually did.  With a smile on his face he said, ‘Well, if you want a bomb dropped on someone, we’re the people to ask’.  The perfect ‘Elevator Pitch’ – less than five seconds and a perfect understanding was communicated.….and no, I never did ask.

Most Capacity Managers can’t do this for their role.  Other individuals within an organization have even more trouble than us because they don’t understand the meaning of Capacity Management or how this affects their daily jobs.  I’ve tried over the years with a variety of similes, in particular trying to relate capacity management to non-IT life:  it’s like putting a dashboard into a car (no good ignores planning/prediction); it’s like predicting where traffic snarl ups will occur on the freeway (‘Why don’t you use it to stop traffic snarl ups happening then?’).  You get the idea – I’ve never found a simile quite good enough.  I’m OK within IT: ‘it’s all about analyzing, reporting and predicting the performance of computers’ is a good start for me.  IT people understand this, but for those outside IT, you watch their eyes glaze over.  It’s when we need to communicate to those who don’t understand IT that things become difficult.

With this in mind, to help others in our organization understand what we do, it is key that we use non-technical verbiage to express how what we do affects their job.  An effective way to express what we do is to use the words  “pain” or “cost”.  It usually gets our attention if our doctor says ‘there might be a little pain’ or our offspring say ‘there could be a little cost involved’.

A statement such as “Effective Capacity Management will allow your data entry staff to process 20% more invoices per hour without any increase in cost” can be an eye opener for them.  Likewise, ‘it will remove the pain of lost business when the on-line ordering service slows down, without impacting your budget’.  If we continually look at how we present our data and how we talk to the business users, we can get more buy in from the business groups.  The ability to incorporate business data into capacity management afforded by Metron’s Athene software and our business view of transactions provided by working with Correlsense’s SharePath software helps us bridge that gap.

I challenge us to develop an elevator pitch in describing what we do and how we can affect the enterprise.  What’s your best five seconds of words explaining to someone non-IT literate what capacity management is all about.

‘Capacity Management? Well, it’s like…………………………………………………………………...’ 

Over to you.

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant