Wednesday 27 August 2014

Prove your worth (CM in a can series 10 of 10)

If you are implementing a Capacity Management process of your own then a useful tip is to initially go for some ‘quick wins’ as these establish traction and credibility, even among the skeptics in your company.

If you’ve been following my series then you’ll know that I’ve been outlining a successful Capacity Management project that I led within a telecommunication company.

At the conclusion of the project the company were able to move forward confidently on our recommendations.

Moving forward…

·         The company expanded the rollout of the tool to include other applications and technologies. 

·         Training was provided to train the staff in using the tool and completing studies such as the ones covered in this engagement.  Other facets of the ITIL CM process were put in place, although some still have room for improvement.

·         Other facets of the ITIL Capacity Management process were put in place and have led them to be more proactive and less reactive

Moving from short term to long term

          Most of the data required is in place

          More focus can be placed on the iterative activities

          More focus needs to be put on maintaining the CMIS and completing the Capacity Plan

          As more M&A activities are planned, CM must be out in front gathering information and providing decision support information
The iterative activities are an extremely important part of the successful Capacity Management process. 

Ongoing monitoring and analysis leads to tuning recommendations and continued improvement of applications and services. 

Maintaining a CDB/CMIS is also important and currently all detailed data is being kept, resulting in the database getting quite big.  Figuring out how to summarize and aggregate and when to delete old data is an important step, especially when continuing to add targets and other objects to the CDB/CMIS.

There will be other opportunities within this Company to study Merger and Acquisition activity and fortunately, those projects will now be easier for their own Capacity Management team.  They will get a much earlier start on new projects in the future and now have the tools and skills in place to complete the work.

I’ll conclude the way I started.

When 2 mature companies (in the area of IT) come together each has its own ideas of what “best practices” actually are.  IT Service Management processes are probably in place in each of the companies and it’s likely that the resulting teams will not simply be a combination of the existing teams.
Technology, tools, applications, services – there will be a lot of redundancy and overlap in all of these areas and decisions will need to be made on which of these will survive.

Having effective Capacity Management in place, or buying in independent expertise, helps to make this process so much easier. 

Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer

A collection of our thoughts and expertise, from a capacity planning perspective, in the form of published white papers, performance tips and on-demand webinars on a variety of cutting edge topics  are available free to download. http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/index.html



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