Capacity Management Maturity, Assesssing & Improving - Setting the Landscape (2 of 4)

What is Capacity Management?

A fairly standard definition of Capacity Management is:

An IT process that helps ensure capacity meets current and a future business requirements in a cost-­‐effective manner.

A well-­‐defined Capacity Management process will focus on four subprocesses:

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.

What is Maturity?

A maturity model is a set of structured levels that describe how well the behaviors, practices, and processes of an organization can reliably produce desired outcomes.

Various models exist. For the purposes of this survey, we’ll focus on the Capability Maturity Model, which consists of five levels of process maturity.

I'll tell you the five levels of process maturity in the Capability Maturity Model on Friday.

Come along to our webinar October 11 'Capacity Management Maturity Series -Managed to Optimized'

https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

Maturing your Capacity Management process - Summary ( 11/11)

As mentioned at the beginning of my blog series, the implementation of a mature business focused capacity process is a long term project that requires a good deal of effort.

In this series  I’ve given you a basic beginner’s guide,  something to present to the business to gauge the potential requirements and interest.

In summary and to provide some guiding principles for anyone looking to achieve a more mature implementation of capacity management, the following are the 5 key areas that should be the focus throughout your project:

·         Involve all aspects of the business as soon as possible.  Early involvement will pay dividends throughout the project with getting buy-in and building communication interfaces

·         Be selective with the technical information being captured and processed.  Across the enterprise there are likely to be hundreds (if not thousands) of metrics available, but it’s likely that only a small subset will be useful.  Remember the more data captured, the more likely you are to miss the important information.

·         Be sensible with the scope.  Start on a service that is important to the business, but isn’t so complex or sensitive that you won’t be able to make any progress.  Review the incident or change records to see if any of the services are suffering large numbers of capacity outages or late change requests for upgrades.

·         Aim for the quick wins where possible and strive to demonstrate value/progress as quickly as possible.

·         Be cautious with tooling.  Get the process configured and ensure that the needs are understood before starting any tooling evaluations.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the series and if you need expert guidance with maturing your capacity management process check out our Consulting Services.

https://www.metron-athene.com/services/consulting/capacity-management-consulting.html

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

Maturing your Capacity Management processes - Demonstrate the 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 – Analyze – 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.

If you missed part 3 of our Capacity Management Maturity series - Defined to Managed you can catch it on demand  in our Resources section. 

https://www.metron-athene.com/resources/index.asp

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

Maturing your Capacity Management processes - People( 8/11)

The number of people used to support the capacity management process within your organization will obviously vary depending on budget, scope, IT landscape etc. 

Throughout the industry there is no set pattern on the number of people associated with capacity management with a wide variance in the number of people deployed regardless of the size of the estate.

If you are starting the journey of implementing capacity management the decision on experience and how many people to recruit will largely depend on the factors outlined above. 

Whether as a business you recruit an experienced capacity manager, contractor or a consultancy company, the one key people element is the utilization of capacity champions. 

A capacity champion is a person that is an expert in their respective area, has an interest in capacity management (they’re probably doing it already in their own silo) and is a good communicator/facilitator.  

The recruitment of champions provides you with the following benefits:

·         Easier to obtain relevant data

·         More detailed expertise and knowledge

·         Improved integration with the business

·         Easier to raise and maintain the profile of the capacity process

The capacity management champion will also be crucial in what I’ll be looking at next time, keeping the momentum going.

Don't forget to register for our live Capacity Management Maturity series webinar taking place today

https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

Maturing your Capacity Management processes - Information and Governance ( 7 of 11 )

With the complexity of today’s modern IT environments and the multitude of delivery mechanisms available, it’s safe to say that organizations are swamped with data. 

The challenge for implementing capacity management is being able to distil this wealth of information into a useable form.  Rather than concentrate on specific platforms or metrics, I have found the following to be a useful guide for filtering information:

·         If implementing for the first time, follow the usual ITIL guidance of starting small and building up.  For capacity management this could be starting with a particular platform, service or application. 

·         Work with technical teams to understand which metrics are available for each of the platforms.  This is especially important when dealing with virtualized platforms as these tend to have various levels e.g. cluster, host, guest etc which are key for capacity planning

·         Work with the application and service support teams to determine all valid metrics and importantly how these can be correlated with the underlying infrastructure data

Remember, the more data captured, the more you need to store, manage and understand.  As well as the obvious capacity implications of storing more and more data, you are also increasing the likelihood of missing key alerts and data trends.

On Wednesday I’ll be looking at your most important asset, People. 

In the meantime why not find out where you are on the Capacity Management Maturity Scale and receive your free 20 page report.

www.metron-athene.com/survey/

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

Maturing your Capacity Management processes – Beginning the journey ( 5 of 11 )

Now that the Gap analysis or process audit is complete you’re ready to take the next step on the journey and begin by building your community.

Starting the process of education by involving key business stakeholders throughout the GAP analysis will have laid firm foundations for this implementation stage. 

It varies between organizations, but a solid first step is to provide a high-level overview of what capacity management is, its requirements and ultimately the benefits to the business.  This should cover the basic principles, the information interfaces and the value it will provide.  The intended audience should be similar to that of the GAP analysis; the key requirement is to include a mixture of people and roles. 

By putting business, capacity and technical staff, (people that wouldn’t inherently mix) together it starts to build the necessary relationships and provide the flow of information required for a business focused process.  In addition, it provides everyone with a common language when talking about capacity management and the required information.

The next requirement, again depending on existing maturity, may be a more intensive look at capacity management, usually spread over a number of days and covering the whole process. 

This sort of course will normally cover all aspects of capacity management e.g. methods, techniques etc and involve staff that are likely to be more hands on or at least have key involvement.  The people attending this course will form the basis of the Special Interest Group for capacity management and on completion of this course can work with the process manager to define the goals, objectives and outputs for capacity management.

At the lowest level of granularity, more technically focused capacity management courses dealing with key elements of a particular technical domain can be provided.  Looking at the requirements of managing a particular domain e.g. vmware, Unix etc; can be useful in providing support personnel with an additional set of skills for front line incident analysis and ensure that everyone is talking the same language.

The next step is of course to automate and on Friday I’ll be talking about tooling. 

If you'd like help with a gap analysis or other capacity management projects contact us. 

https://www.metron-athene.com/services/consulting/capacity-management-consulting.html

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

Hardware's a commodity - Why bother managing capacity? Conclusion (7 of 7)

The perception of IT by many has changed.  End-users and customers see IT as a commodity – no different than throwing a light switch.  Therefore, those of us in IT Capacity Management must work hard to combat the perception that improving performance or managing capacity is as easy as throwing a switch or buying another blade.

This can be done in two key ways, by constantly:

·        Communicating to those in other ITSM processes and the business.

·        Building value by maturing existing Capacity Management processes.

That said, it’s always important to evaluate your career and how you can improve your own situation.  Whether you want to stay with your current company or move on…and whether you want to stay in Capacity Management or move on...is up to you.  I hope.  That’s not always the case, and I’ve seen very talented people looking for work through no real fault of their own.

But any such blow can be minimized by preparing for the next challenge even while you’re working on the current one.  Take technical training, ITIL (or other good practice framework) training, or company specific training.  Take advantage of tuition reimbursement when possible and never miss an opportunity to network, network, network.

If it's Capacity Management training that you're interested in then check out our on-demand workshops https://www.metron-athene.com/services/index.html#workshops

And never stop thinking about where you’d like to be, which may or may not be where you currently are.

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer

Hardware's a commodity - Why bother managing capacity? Being ready for the next challenge…(6 of 7)

There are a ton of career-improvement and life-improvement books in the marketplace.

An early mentor of mine used the word pivot a lot, though, and it’s stuck with me over the years.  As a basketball fan and referee, I’ve always liked the term for more than one reason.

Everyone is in a different place – out of work, having a job but wanting to change their career or career trajectory, enjoying what they do but wanting to make more of a difference.

A new book called “Pivot” by Adam Markel describes the small changes one must make in their thinking and behavior that can lead to a big change in both personal and professional outcomes.  I highly recommend the book to anyone looking to make small, but real changes in their lives.

Now for some specific recommendations for the Capacity Manager, looking at how you can make some changes – some small, some bigger.

Education

There are two career-based reasons to seek out education – to perform your current job better and to position yourself better for future opportunities.  The best choices can be used for both reasons.

Your organization uses certain technologies – becoming expert in those will make you a better Capacity Manager. 

•        Technical training / certifications

•        ITIL training / certifications

•        Project Manager training / certifications

For example, if you are responsible for performance and capacity of VMware systems, becoming VCP certified will make you much more valuable to the organization and someday that certification might be a door opener if you decide to move onto something else.  In a commoditized world, it’s important for the Capacity Manager to understand why those technologies are really more than just commodities to buy, use, and throw away.

ITIL (or some other best practice) training and certification is especially useful in those organizations that have adopted / aligned to those standards.  Becoming Manager (v2) certified and Expert (v3) certified opened the doors in my career and even as a Capacity Manager would give me a well-rounded understanding of the other ITSM processes and the terminology used in them.

I’ve seen many people in technical roles take project manager training and seek out certifications and then segue into those kinds of positions in organizations.  Good project managers can never be underestimated and the skills will serve anyone who manages projects in IT well, even if it isn’t a career path.

Companies have all kinds of specialized training – about the business, about specific technologies they use.  If your company has an education department with courses that can be taken to teach new skills and those courses are made available to you, they’re a great option. 

•        Company specific training / certifications

•        Groups / Events like CMG, Toastmasters, etc.

•        Tuition reimbursement plans

Being able to speak in public is a skill many of us take for granted, but many more find absolutely terrifying.  And yet the ability to give a good presentation can be one of the things that can launch a career or change an existing one in a positive way.  Writing papers for CMG is a way to network with fellow Capacity Managers and establish credibility in the industry – there are many people who have improved their careers by making contacts at CMG or other technical events.

Finally, if your organization offers a tuition reimbursement plan where you can take college courses or pursue a degree on the company dime and/or time, consider it.  It’s how I started my MBA – and while it took me 4 years to complete, it was one of the best decisions I could’ve made for my career. I'll conclude my series on Wednesday, in the meantime make sure to check out our Resources section where you'll find a great collection of Capacity Management related white papers and on-demand webinars https://www.metron-athene.com/resources/index.asp

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer 

Hardware's a commodity - Why bother managing capacity? Evaluating your career path (5 of 7)

So, we’ve established that maturing the Capacity Management process can be a useful step in making your career as a Capacity Manager a more successful one.  But how do you know that’s what you want to do…or that’s the best path for you?

Constant career evaluation is necessary – whether you’re in your first year out of college/university or whether you’ve been in your career / position for 20+ years.

Most successful people have changed positions and have re-invented themselves over the course of a career.  But a person can’t decide to make a career change without having a plan that can sometimes take years to put into place.

Some organizations I’ve worked for made it very clear that my services weren’t as appreciated as I would’ve liked.  I’m sure that many of you reading this blog have your own stories.  Being able to read the landscape and put the framework into place to improve your situation or even change your career is an important step.

I’ll talk a bit about my own experience. I think my experiences are pretty typical and hopefully will get you to think about your own experiences and career path.

This is probably where I should put in the contradictory disclaimer that my results probably aren’t typical (despite my last paragraph) and your personal results and experiences will vary.

These 5 cases show that there are times when the best option is to stay and try to make the situation better, yet there are times where the best option is to try to find something that matches your career goals, whether or not they have anything to do with Capacity Management.

•        Hired at the wrong time…

•        Hired at the wrong place…

•        Get out before you’re asked to leave…

•        I can’t believe I took this job…

•        I need to make changes, but want to stay...

Hired at the wrong time…

“If you’d been hired a month earlier, you’d be up for a raise this year.”

“Last year was a much better year – we can’t hire anyone else now.  We need to do more with less.”

Sometimes you’re just not in the right place or perhaps it is, but it’s not the right time.

My first position coming out of school was a good starting point for my career, but 10 months after being hired I was told raises were only given once a year and I’d have to wait another year before they’d consider one.

A month later I moved to another company across the country, even though I was young and inexperienced at the time, I decided that this was indicative of bigger problems in the organization and it was time to move on.

Sometimes, you have to read your situation and decide whether it’s time to make a change.

I understand 20 years on that this is easier said than done.  As a newly married person with no kids and no ties to the community, this was an easy, easy decision.  Then again, I said that your mileage may vary.

But sometimes you have to decide if messages you’re receiving are telling you that you’re not as valued as you’d like to be.  From there you have to decide whether you try to improve your standing / situation there or whether it’s time to try to move on.

Hired at the wrong place…

“We’re a mainframe shop.  Those Unix and Windows servers are just toys.”

This quote was actually said to me when I was working as a distributed capacity planner.  OK, it was said to me at the end of the 20^th century, but even then it was easy to see this wasn’t probably the right gig for me, even though the position was clearly needed and we did good work.

Get out before you’re asked to leave…

“We’ll need you to do more than (what you were hired to do).  The business has changed – there’s no room for specialists.”

Sometimes you can be the right person for the job, but then the job changes.

You can be the best Capacity Manager doing incredible work at an organization that (mostly) appreciates your efforts.

But you might work for a company that was just acquired or merged with another company and suddenly you’re working for someone who has no appreciation for Capacity Management other than “here’s a well-paid person who doesn’t actually manage or administer anything.”

At this point you have several choices – you can reinvent yourself (if possible) to be what the organization now needs.  You can try to get the training necessary to move into another gig (I’ll talk more about this later – and how when you NEED the training, it’s probably too late), or you can move on.

For me, it was an acquisition.  Strangely enough, I was hired just after the acquisition, but after a couple of years the company decided to focus on other things and my role was changed.  Even with me willing to change, I knew that my time was limited, and I moved on.

I can’t believe I took this job…

“….................................................................................................."
I’ll let you fill in the blanks on this quote, I’m sure many of you have taken a position and known within two weeks that you made a horrible mistake.

For me it was a desire to stop traveling and get back into the day-to-day world of Capacity Management.  Within two weeks I knew I would never be more than what I was the day I started with the company, it still took me 18 months to escape.

How many of you have been there?  Whether it’s the manager, co-workers, company culture, the job, the direction of the company, or many other things, how many of you have immediately known that it was just a horrible fit?

Even in these situations, you have options.  For me, it was starting an MBA program (paid for by the company I couldn’t wait to leave) and learning as much as I could about various technologies the company used.  I also took the opportunity to apply for other jobs (internally and externally), sharpen my interviewing skills, and realize that others had things much worse.

If you haven’t ever been in a job like this, congratulations!

I need to make changes, but want to stay…

“I love the company, but I can’t keep doing this job anymore.  At least not like this.”

Sometimes everything is right with the exception of what you’re doing for the company.  Perhaps you’ve done a job for so long that you need a new challenge.  Perhaps your life situation has changed and you need more flexibility in your working conditions or situations.  Perhaps you find yourself interested in something else or maybe you just can’t keep doing things the way you’re doing them now.

If you are a Capacity Manager and generally like what you do, but just can’t keep on doing it the same way, with the same results, then look at the Capacity Management Maturity part of the white paper.  Trying to implement changes, even if minor, to improve the process can change the job and more importantly can change how you feel about it.

If, however, you need to move on, this is the time where you hope you have some people who respect and value your contributions and can help you move on to a new challenge in the company.

There's still time to register for our webinar today 'Capacity Management Maturity Series -Repeatable to Defined'  

 https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer