A fairly standard definition of Capacity Management is
‘An IT process that helps ensure capacity meets current and future business
requirements in a cost-effective manner.’
A well-defined Capacity Management process will focus
on four sub-processes:
·
Business Capacity Management – translating business
needs and plans into capacity and performance requirements for services and
infrastructure.
·
Service Capacity Management – managing the capacity of
live, operational IT services. This
includes both proactive and reactive activities to ensure SLAs are met.
·
Component Capacity Management – managing the
performance, utilization, and capacity of IT resources and individual IT
components.
·
Capacity Management Reporting – To provide other ITSM
processes and management with information related to service and component
capacity, utilization, and performance.
In order to support the process, specific activities
(monitoring, analysis, tuning, modeling, etc.) are undertaken in both proactive
and reactive ways.
Capacity
Management – a “people” process
Today’s Capacity Manager must be a “people” person –
the days of the person looking at charts in a corner cubicle that nobody dare
enter are (or should be) over.
An effective Capacity Manager today is someone who
should know and interact with key people within both IT and the business. Further,
Capacity Management has some key interfaces to the other ITSM processes,
including:
-- Incident Management
-- Problem Management
-- Change Management
-- Service Level Management
…and many others.
Those interfaces do not only consist of data and
information. They also consist of
effective communication by the Capacity Manager and relationships built on
trust and respect. Building these
relationships require that the Capacity Manager have personal and communication
skills that were probably less important decades ago.
Capacity Management is a key resource for evaluating
the effects of change, both within IT and with the business.
On Friday I'll be looking at Capacity Management Maturity.
In the meantime, register now for the next webinar in our Capacity Management Maturity series where we'll be looking at Repeatable to Defined, with an emphasis on what is involved when maturing to a Defined
level.
Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer
No comments:
Post a Comment