As mentioned I was recently asked to manage a project where a telecommunications company would be converting customers from a previous company to combined existing applications and dealing with anticipated growth and further acquisitions.
The goal, short term, was to ensure that these conversions would happen while still meeting existing service level agreements. The longer term goal was to put a capacity management process in place in order to be better prepared for the organization to handle these challenges going forward
A key part of this project was to ensure that key applications would have enough capacity to handle the conversion of acquired customers. As part of the negotiation process, about two dozen applications/services were identified and prioritized. These applications were complex, multi-tiered, customer-facing applications, many of them web based.
We had only 3 months from the beginning of the project to the first set of main deliverables with little formal Capacity Management process in place.
Before agreeing to the timescales, it was necessary for us to figure out how much work (prep, scoping, actual modeling and predictions, delivery of results etc.) needed to be done for each application. While part of the goal was to implement a Capacity Management process, it quickly became obvious as time grew shorter and shorter that complete implementation of a capacity management process was impossible and that the main goal was to deliver results for the identified applications.
Which leads me to a question:
Which of the following is NOT an appropriate short-term objective for Capacity Management?
• Develop and document a functional spec
• Implement an integrated set of CM tools
• Discuss roles and interfaces with other SM processes
• Document the scope, objectives, and terms of reference for CM
This question is from a sample examination used in the v2 ITIL Capacity Management Practitioner course.
As a believer in aligning a Capacity Management process to ITIL and as someone who has taught the Practitioner course and delivered training and consulting designed to help companies develop their SM processes and align their practices to ITIL, I knew that implementing an integrated set of Capacity Management tools is not considered a short-term objective.
And yet the first task required in this project, as identified by a Gap Analysis performed before the project was agreed to, was the implementation of a Capacity Management tool, as nothing existed in the environment to capture historical component data.
Before I discuss this piece of the project, let’s back up and talk about implementing Capacity Management. Normally, the process itself should be built and that process should lead to the purchase of tools, etc.
It just goes to show that sometimes in the real world parts of ITIL have to go out of the window, this wasn’t a typical process – it was driven by specific need and the timescales were very compressed.
Implementing Capacity Management, or any Service Management process, is not something that is done without proper planning and that’s what I’ll be looking at next…
Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer
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