J: The typical contents of a Capacity Plan
The typical contents of a Capacity Plan are as follows.
INTRODUCTION
This section briefly explains the background to this issue of the Capacity Plan, how it was produced and what it contains. For example:
- The current services, technology and resources
- The organization's current levels of capacity
- Problems being experienced or envisaged due to over or under-capacity
- The degree to which service levels are being achieved
- What has changed since the last issue of the plan.
MANAGEMENT SUMMARY
Much of the Capacity Plan, by necessity, contains technical detail that is not of interest to all readers of the plan. The management summary should highlight the main issues, options, recommendations and costs. It may be necessary to produce a separate executive summary document that contains the main points from each of the sections of the main plan.
BUSINESS SCENARIOS
It is necessary to put the plan into the context of the current and envisaged business environment. For example a British airline planned to move a large number of staff into its headquarters building. A ratio of 1.7 people per desktop terminal was forecast. Capacity Management was alerted and was able to calculate the extra network traffic that would result.
It is important to mention explicitly all known business forecasts so that readers can determine what is within and what is outside the scope of the plan. It should include the anticipated growth in existing services, the potential new services and existing services scheduled for closure.
SCOPE AND TERMS OF REFERENCE OF THE PLAN
Ideally, the Capacity Plan should encompass all IT resources. This section should explicitly name those elements of the IT infrastructure that are included and those that are excluded, if any.
METHODS USED
The Capacity Plan uses information gathered by the subprocesses. This sub-section, therefore, should contain details of how and when this information was obtained - for example, business forecasts obtained from business plans, workload forecasts obtained from customers, service level forecasts obtained by the use of modelling tools.
ASSUMPTIONS MADE
It is important that any assumptions made, particularly those concerning the business drivers for IT Capacity, are highlighted early on in the plan. If they are the cornerstones on which more detailed calculations are built, then it is vital that all concerned understand this.P>
SERVICE SUMMARY
The service summary section should include:
- Current and recent service provision: for each service that is delivered, provide a service profile. This should include throughput rates and the resulting resource utilization - for example, of memory, storage space, transfer rates, processor usage and network usage. Short-, medium- and long-term trends should be presented here.
- Service forecasts: the business plans should provide Capacity Management with details of the new services planned and the growth or contraction in the use of existing services. This sub-section should report on new services and the demise of legacy systems.
RESOURCE SUMMARY
The resource summary section should include:
- Current and recent resource usage: this sub-section concentrates on the resulting resource usage by the services. It reports, again, on the short-, medium- and long-term trends in resource usage, broken down by hardware platform. This information has been gathered and analysed by the sub-processes of Service Capacity Management and Component Capacity Management and so should be readily available.
- Resource forecasts: this sub-section forecasts the likely resource usage resulting from the service forecasts. Each business scenario mentioned above should be addressed here. For example, a carpet wholesale business in the North of England could accurately predict what the peak and average processor usage would be before they decided to take over a rival business. It was proved that an upgrade would not be required. This was fed into the cost model, leading to a successful takeover.
OPTIONS FOR SERVICE IMPROVEMENT
Building on the results of the previous section, this section outlines the possible options for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of Service Delivery. It could contain options for merging different services on a single processor, upgrading the network to take advantage of technological advances, tuning the use of resource or service performance, rewriting legacy systems, purchasing new hardware or software etc.
COSTS FORECAST
The costs associated with these options should be documented here. In addition, the current and forecasted cost of providing IT services should be included. In practice, Capacity Management obtains much of this information from the Financial Management process and the IT Financial Plan.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The final section of the plan should contain a summary of the recommendations made in the previous plan and their status - for example, rejected, planned, implemented - and any variances from the plan. Any new recommendations should be made here, i.e. which of the options mentioned in the plan is preferred, and the implications if the plan and its recommendations are not implemented should also be included.
The recommendations should be quantified in terms of the:
- Business benefits to be expected
- Potential impact of carrying out the recommendations
- Risks involved
- Resources required
- Cost, both set-up and ongoing.
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