Capacity Management: Guided Practitioner Satnav – Demand Management (11 of 17)

A typical management edict for IT is to ‘do more with less’. But typically there are more requests for work than resources. Demand management is commonly proposed as a way to understand and throttle demand from customers.

It is important as requests for projects often outstrip the resource capabilities of service providers.

Demand management is described as a capacity management activity within service delivery in ITIL V2  focusing on degradation of service due to unexpected increases in demand or partial interruptions to service. In ITIL V3 it is allocated to service strategy with a wider view of its scope and links with capacity management identified, but still focused on patterns of business activity and user profiles.

In this blog it’s used to include both of the above as well as establishing longer term practices to deal with handling requests for new services, avoiding un-necessary peaks in workload, provisioning of resources, setting service priorities and quotas, chargeback and related activities.  It covers the entire spectrum, from over-provisioning without regard to cost to under-provisioning such that there is no headroom and hence capacity problems.

•          Control demand for resources to meet levels that the business is willing to support

•          Optimize and rationalize demand for the use of IT to achieve optimum provision

–        One extreme of over-provisioning without regard to cost

–        Other of under-provisioning so that there is no headroom

•          Understand and throttle/smooth peaks, if possible, in customer demand or priority

•          Control degradation of service due to peaks in demand or downtime/slowtime

•          Use budgets/priorities/chargeback/quotas for workloads and new services

•          Use ‘levels of critical’ categorization for workloads (gold/silver/bronze)

•          Plans for when business requirements cannot be fulfilled due to:

–        HW or SW failure

–        Unexpected budgetary constraints/ demand increase

•          Decisions based on problems being short term or long term?

–        Short-term: only mission critical services supported

–        Long-term: management of resource constraints

•          Need to identify the critical services and the resources they use

–        Business plans, Service catalogue, Change requests, SIPs

–        Service priorities and their mapping to resources

It is not just about how quickly a new system can be provisioned and how much faster that can be done when everything is virtualised.

You’ll also need to set some time constraints and on Friday I’ll look at ‘When will I get there?’

In the meantime there's a chance for one person to win a signed copy of my Capacity Management book (referred to in the first blog of this series)Simply subscribe to our blog or YouTube Channel,Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn between 31st January and 15th March inclusive to be entered in to our drawing. 

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The winner will be notified and published after the drawing on 29th March 2013. 

Adam Grummitt

Distinguished Engineer