Capacity Management – How do we tell the story?

As Capacity Planners, we are tasked with providing the information needed to allow the business to make decisions on necessary IT changes for the enterprise. There are times where this information is provided in ad-hoc ways and other times where it needs to be a formal document and presentation.

There are different components to providing these two styles of advice but the challenge is the same, how do we tell the Capacity Management story?

Capacity Planners have to present to different audiences and whilst the information provided can usually be found in the same reports, the way of relaying this information to each audience varies. The way a capacity planner presents to individuals at the “C” level is different to that presented at the director and management level. The “C” level audience want you to get to the bottom line as quickly as possible whereas the director and manager levels are more interested in detail.  For the ‘C’ level, it’s about ‘when’ it will be a problem and how you plan to avoid it, other levels need to know ‘why’ it will hurt, to assess if ‘how’ you plan to avoid it will work.

So what kind of things should go in to the production of a regular capacity report? How do we go about determining which Key Performance Indicators and business metrics should be in there?

What kind of reports can be shown to different levels within an enterprise and how can we make these appropriate for the different audiences?

These are all questions facing every Capacity Planner. Aside from the focus of exactly what the story is that we are attempting to tell, there are a myriad of possible options for presenting our advice. So how do we decide which is the best for our audience?

Our years of experience have taught us a few tips and techniques for presenting the data in an appropriate manner and shown us how we can automate the process as much as possible.

We’re happy to share this knowledge with you but it’s way too large a subject to deal with in just one blog. By popular demand therefore I’m running a free to attend webinar today which provides guidance and answers to these questions and more.

Register now and come along – I’m looking forward to it.
http://www.metron-athene.com/training/webinars/index.html

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant