What is Capacity Management in ITIL?

Capacity management is the practice of right-sizing IT resources to meet current and future needs. It’s also one of five areas of ITIL Service Delivery.

Effective capacity management is proactive, not reactive. Those doing well at capacity management make sure that business and service needs are met with a minimum of IT resources.

What's Included in Capacity Management in ITIL?

There are many IT tasks that fall under the umbrella of a capacity management process. Here are some of them:

◉ Monitor, analyze, and optimize IT resource utilization

◉ Manage demand for computing resources (this requires an understanding of business priorities)

◉ Create a model of infrastructure performance to understand future resource needs

◉ Right-size applications to make sure service levels can be met (without overdoing it)

◉ Produce a capacity plan that covers current use, forecasted needs, and support costs for new applications/releases

◉ Build the annual infrastructure growth plan with input from other teams

5 Steps to Successful Capacity Management

As with all major projects, proper planning is key. If you’re looking to get your project off the ground, here are the five steps you should take. To plan for where your capacity is going, you need to know where you’re at. That’s why it’s important to identify a capacity manager and form a capacity management team.

This team can then:

◉ Develop a mission, including desired end-state goals, processes, and responsibilities
◉ Assess the current state of capacity management
◉ Evaluate existing capacity management skills of the IT staff
◉ Take inventory of tools and software currently used for monitoring, capacity planning, performance management, and chargeback
◉ Collect budget details for capacity management work
◉ Perform a gap analysis to reveal areas that require process improvements, training, or software

Why Should I Implement Capacity Management?

Capacity management is critical to keeping IT costs down and quality of service up.

Most organizations use it to:

◉ Get more out of existing IT resources
◉ Improve IT cost per service unit positions
◉ Fine-tune applications and infrastructure components
◉ Improve performance, reduce consumption, and delay upgrades
◉ Eliminate redundant work
◉ Ensure consistent reporting
◉ Provision capacity efficiently
◉ Make informed business decisions using timely capacity and related cost information
◉ Provide insight into the total cost of ownership (TCO) of IT upgrades and initiatives
◉ Predict future use based on growth levels
◉ Uncover bottlenecks with enough time to stop them before service is affected

Capacity management teams also have close ties to ITIL service level management and financial management areas.

In fact, capacity management processes lead to a more thorough service level and associated financial information for the business. And this helps business leaders make more informed decisions.

Where Do I Start?

Capacity management is often the starting point for an ITIL Service Delivery initiative.

Here’s why. It offers quick, early wins. And these typically create enough cost savings to fund the remainder of your ITIL project. In our experience, such savings are typically in the millions of dollars.

Plus, recovering implementation costs and showing success keeps the project afloat. (This also encourages upper management to stay the course and reduces resistance in your organization.)