Task: Plan For Technology Capacity

The Capacity Manager must formalize all important aspects of Technology Capacity Management and create a Technology Capacity Plan. This plan must define and encapsulate the scope and objectives of technology capacity. It should contain the current and future levels of IT resource utilization and service performance.

During the planning, Capacity Manager must assess the desired capacity against the existing capacity. The desired capacity is understood from the capacity requirements gathered. The comparison of desired capacities against existing capacities determines the level of effort required to bridge the gap between the two. The Capacity Manager must also come up with the solutions to fill the gap and it must be documented.

Business demands must be understood to arrive at forecasts (future requirements), so that sufficient IT capacity to support any new or changed services, can be planned. The Capacity Manager must forecast the future requirements for new IT resources considering the business strategy plans of the Client. These business demands should then be worked out with Financial Management, to arrive at cost effective and timely solutions. The plan should also include recommendations (if any) quantified in terms of IT components required, cost, benefits, impact, etc.
`
Capacity Manager must design for technology capacity based on the service level agreements. The SLAs should include details of the anticipated service throughputs and the performance requirements. IT services, use of resources, working patterns, peaks and troughs must be understood. The Capacity Manager should identify and understand the performance, capacity and utilization of each of the individual components within the technology used to support the IT services. Design aspects should also consider resilience requirements within the IT infrastructure.

In case of new applications or applications that go through a major change, the Capacity Manager should be involved at the very beginning of the application lifecycle. This enables application developers to accommodate the required service levels, starting from the initial application design. This will ensure that design and/or application development do not need to change their plans at a later stage, which will be far more expensive.

A baseline is minimum capacity and performance requirements across all IT services and components and supports the generation of capacity reports and the setting of capacity thresholds and alerts. Defining appropriate threshold is very important for all the service and component within IT infrastructure. Hence while planning for capacity, Capacity Manager must ensure that all service and component thresholds are maintained at the appropriate levels and are continuously, automatically monitored through the Event Management process. When the current capacity level of as IT service or component, which is critical for business increases or decreases to the threshold, then an alerts/warnings/exception reports are generated. Thresholds and baselines for each service are recorded in the Technology Capacity Plan.

The review and modification to the Technology Capacity Plan should occur at regular intervals and when major changes are planned or approved.