Maturing your Capacity Management processes - Demonstrate value (10 of 11)

Sometimes getting started and maintaining capacity management can be a hard sell into an organization, especially where the common misconception is that just increasing the available capacity is cheap. 

There are a number of methods that can be used to demonstrate the progress being made and the value to the business:

·         Ensure all presentations and reports contain the right level of data.  Whether it’s for the business or a technical department, ensure that it’s written in a way that means something to them

·         In the initial audit or implementation phase there will be objectives set by the business about what they want to see from the capacity process.  Ensure these are understood and at least some of the KPIs are built around those objectives.

·         Carefully monitor incidents and problems, ensure all capacity related tickets are captured and ultimately reduced over time.

Continual Service Improvement (CSI) is a “reasonably new” concept within ITIL, but capacity management has had an iterative cycle of “Monitor – Analyse – Tune – Change” since at least version 2.  This cycle of improvement is critical in optimizing the IT environment and is one of the key parts of the process for creating value. 

By optimizing the environment the process can demonstrate the following:

o   Release of spare capacity

o   Deferred or optimized expenditure

o   Ensure service level targets are met, whilst reducing costs

On Wednesday I’ll summarize in the final part of my blog series. Remember to sign up to our Community and gain access to some great white papers on Capacity Management http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources/published-papers/login.asp

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant