Often capacity managers feel they’re in a never ending battle to show their value

 You can be successful 99% of the time with your predictions and analysis, but that 1% of the time you’re not, business users begin to doubt you.  What do you do in this circumstance besides throw paper at them? 

One thing that might help is to have a defined capacity management process. 

 A well-defined process leads to gaining the confidence of the business users where your projections are concerned.  This allows you to fall back on the information, show them the process you are following and convince them that it is not hit and miss.  That 1% is typically always down to issues with the quality of data you have to work with, timeliness of receiving that data and more. Having a defined, visible process shows that it is not the process itself that is at fault.  Many times the reaction from the business users is because the unexpected, in many cases, will cause an increase in cost.

 Along with the challenges we’re already facing in the community, the business users are now asking how “our” transactions are responding.  As you begin to ask them the question of “what do you mean by a transaction”, you get “when the person fills out a form on the screen and hits enter, how do we know everything is working fine?  Now we all know what it means when they say “fine”.  It means I don’t want to hear from my people that their applications are running slow and they can’t get their work done.  This is where an additional item to your capacity management process is necessary, that addition being Application Transaction Monitoring.

Application Transaction Monitoring gives you the ability to not only monitor the capacity of your servers within the enterprise; it enables you to determine what is happening from the application point of view. This monitoring is more critical these days as the setup of the IT environments become ever more complex. 

What Application Transaction Monitoring brings to the table is the ability to monitor an application transaction every step of the way throughout its lifecycle.  The ability to take this information and marry it to the server data allows you to gain both breadth and depth of the IT environment. 

Now back to the question that I began with, what do you do when the business users say they don’t have confidence in your information?  Show them you have a well-defined and visible capacity management process.  Show them that this process has both depth, from business data down to technical resource levels, and breadth, covering across an application from their perspective.  By having both of these, you are going to be able to show them both sets of information and talk them down off the ledge.  Any issues should move from ‘you got the numbers wrong’ to ‘well, we can see how your process should work, what input do you need to make it work successfully for us?’

Are we as capacity managers going to be 100 % accurate? No, but by showing that we are gathering and analyzing all the information that is available, they will walk away with an understanding that you have given the best results possible. 

Now when they leave your office, you can throw the paper at the door.

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant