Capacity Management: Guided Practitioner Satnav – Capacity Plan (16 of 17)

A longer term goal should be the production of the Capacity Plan.  This is a key deliverable from the Capacity Management process and provides a capacity strategy aligned to the business. 

The capacity plan is written in such a way that business forecasts are translated to technical requirements.  This can include discussion of saturation points of existing architecture (which may be determined via modeling) and recommendations to avoid hitting those saturation points.

The scope of the capacity plan is strategic (more long-term), tactical (short-term future), and operational (discussing day-to-day issues).

The main goal of the capacity plan is the same as the main goal of the process (not coincidentally): To describe the most cost-effective way to meet requirements (SLAs) both now and in the future.

Scenario planning can be a major component of a capacity plan, as potentially many different scenarios could occur in the next business planning cycle and Capacity Management should consider all of these.

The diagram above provides a very high-level process of producing the Capacity Plan; currently the majority of the capacity data collected is at the component level.  This is an essential stage in the process development and provides a solid foundation for moving to the next levels: service and business capacity.  The boxes highlighted in orange indicate that currently these areas of missing with regards to the virtualisation environment.  Although it is acknowledged that there is a drive within the ESM team to monitor the virtualised servers at the service level. Moving forward it is expected the appointment of a Capacity Manager should start to address these absent parts of the process.

Procedures and work instructions are the next step.

The ‘top level’ slides in this and my previous blog need to be underpinned by more detailed tables identifying a skeleton framework for the infrastructure, such as some of the examples indicated in this slide

Terms of Reference

Process descriptions

Procedures and work instructions

KPIs

VI Metrics

There is too much detail to put in to a slide but hopefully you’ll find this indicative of the type of necessary detail required to take a project forward.

I’ll conclude my series on Monday with ‘Why should I go there?’

Adam Grummitt

Distinguished Engineer