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

It's all about the CMIS - Challenges (7 of 9)

As with everything there are going to be some challenges but get it right and there will be benefits too. I've outlined these below:

Challenges

Capturing from multiple data sources and across the enterprise

You’ll need to interact with the different departments and sources to explain or convince them why you need the data.

·        Siloed databases

·        3^rd party sources

Capturing data at the correct level and interpreting

Are you able to capture the data at the correct level and ensure that it includes all the necessary components that you need to report on i.e. vCenter data that encompasses all parts of the VMware infrastructure?

Successfully synchronising the data

Data will need to be synchronised, to establish consistency among data from its source to the CMIS. You need to piece together component, service and business data for the same granularity and date and time to provide a fuller more accurate picture of service usage.

·        Date/time, intervals

Relating Business, Service and component elements

Successfully piecing together component, service and business data for the individual elements that make up the service including incorporating the relationships between them using information from CMDBs, provided of course that the information within the CMDB is up-to-date.

Benefits

Overcoming the challenges of implementing a CMIS and populating with data will provide many noticeable benefits to the business outweighing these challenges.

Improved accuracy – being able to sift through the data and analyse for patterns of activity and seasonality will improve the accuracy of the reports produced and delivered to key stakeholders.

Meaningful thresholds – analysis of a typical period allows you to establish ‘normal’ behaviour for a system and set meaningful thresholds accordingly.

Enable the capacity portal –the CMIS underpins the whole capacity management process which includes the capacity portal and undertaking the valuable capacity management techniques.  Having the data available in logical single location provides centralised reporting into the portal which is accessible to authorised users across the web. 

Underpin valuable capacity management techniques

·        Modelling

·        Tuning

·        Demand Management

On Friday I'll be looking at how you can provide some chargeback but don't forget to take a look at our Resources, for some great white papers and on-demand webinars.

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

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

It's all about the CMIS - Importance of Correlation (5 of 9)

This graphic explains how we can gather the necessary information from the Component, Service and Business Capacity Management processes (Blue) and start to correlate the information together (Green) and  then feed the information back to other ITSM processes (White). 

This not only provides other processes with a valuable insight into both the performance and capacity of Services, it also can identify key business patterns of activity to help select modeling periods for Capacity Plans, feed SLM reporting, provide information for KPIs such as numbers of incidents caused by Capacity or Performance issues or outages and provide root cause analysis information for Problem.

Importance of Correlation

For Capacity Planning purposes, the importance of being able to correlate application transaction information with component usage is extremely important as this slide demonstrates.  The example here plots the number of Service Desk calls being reported through the application and its servers CPU usage.

 

Note the correlation between the rise in calls and the CPU usage.

From this we can start to look into producing models of an increase in numbers of Service Desk calls and its impact on the existing infrastructure used to attempt to identify a pain point and prevent slow performance or service failure. 

All of this can be achievable through implementing an enterprise Capacity Management tool that not only captures and stores data from all sub processes into a CMIS, but has the reporting and planning capabilities as mentioned throughout.

Please note though that you need to be careful on assuming that a simple trend on the CPU will suffice here due to the utilization laws as mentioned earlier on.

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 Monday 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/index.html

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

Maturing your Capacity Management processes – Interviews/Workshops ( 4 of 11)

The real information and business integration starts here. 

The individual interviews are essential in obtaining the complex information about a particular department or business area; the reality being that most people are far more willing to talk openly about particular issues when meeting individually.

It also allows for a degree of knowledge transfer, in particular some business areas or departments who might not have any prior knowledge of capacity management and provides an overview of what the project objectives are e.g. what are we trying to achieve?

One of the prime advantages with this approach is the early involvement of all key areas of the business.

This is especially true with the workshop format. Bringing together groups of people that may not normally work that closely together forges more of a co-operative working party, where ideas can flow and people can properly challenge others in a constructive, facilitative way.  These people may also become capacity management champions and form the beginnings of a capacity management community or capacity management special interest group.

So the GAP analysis/process audit has been completed and should have documented the current situation, the desired situation and a series of prioritized next steps for getting there.

Much as before, there are lots of things that will be required to implement or mature a business focused capacity process.  I’ll start to take a look at the “key next steps” and an approach that has been successfully used in a number of organizations on Friday. 

In the meantime join our community for access to our resources - white papers, on-demand webinars, performance tips and more. http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources/index.html

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

Maturing your Capacity Management processes - The Questionnaire (3 of 11)

Questionnaires tend to be a standard tool for capacity management maturity exercises with most organizations providing on-line variants or a standardized set of questions. 

This approach can be very useful as a starting point but their generic nature tends to mean there are lots of questions that are irrelevant to particular people or departments. 

While it’s true that most organizations face similar challenges, these challenges can be caused by different sets of circumstances. The other issue is language or jargon, in an ideal world everyone would talk the same language, the reality is that most organizations still have terminology or processes unique to them and a questionnaire is unlikely to align with the way things are done within your world.

Having said all that, questionnaires are very useful as a facilitator for future interviews and workshops. They begin the process of getting people to start thinking along the same lines.  By providing a selection of “standard” templates, people can begin to understand what will be required from them or their particular area.

The next step is the interviews and workshops themselves which I’ll discuss on Wednesday. In the meantime why not take our Capacity Management Maturity survey and find out where you are on the Maturity Scale

www.metron-athene.com/survey/

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

Maturing your Capacity Management processes - Situation Appraisal( 2 of 11)

Before you can set about implementing or maturing any ITIL process, the first step is to conduct a process audit or GAP analysis.  

This can obviously be done internally, but it’s unlikely to provide an objective and honest appraisal.  A better option is to use some targeted consultancy that will provide the necessary expertise, knowledge and importantly, objectivity.  Whether it’s delivered internally or via a third party the following approach has always proved successful.

Rather than using a prescriptive approach each time, a combination of the following will yield the relevant (and appropriate) information. 

The roles or groups will alter slightly depending on the organization but the following areas should be engaged to ensure the project is successful.

·         Key business stakeholders

·         Service Managers or Service Owners

·         Technical domain experts

·         Tooling Personnel – Monitoring, alerting etc

·         Existing capacity staff

·         Service Management personnel

Every environment is unique; however there are a number of key questions that should be asked. By thinking these through it will help to ensure you create a Strategy for Capacity Management, and if you need to de-scope elements to start building momentum, you will at least have a clear sight of your end objectives.

     ·         What information channels/interfaces exist currently?               
   ·         What reports are available and the associated delivery            mechanism?

         ·         What metrics are captured and how are their thresholds derived?
         ·         What tooling is available?
         ·         What KPIs are being used?
         ·         What capacity deliverables are being provided?
         ·         Is the business suffering from capacity outages?
         ·         Are upgrades performed in a timely fashion?                            

I’ll be looking at questionnaires and their relevance on Friday. Why not register for our webinar ' Capacity Management Maturity series - Initial to Repeatable'

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

Jamie Baker

Principal Consultant

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 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 share the five levels of process maturity in the Capability Maturity Model on Monday.

Don't forget to sign up for our webinar series 'Capacity Management Maturity - Initial to Repeatable'
https://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/capacity-management-webinars.html

Rich Fronheiser

Chief Marketing Officer