Capacity and Performance Management
What Is ITIL Capacity and Performance Management?
ITIL capacity and performance management is one of 34 ITIL management
practices. This service management practice falls within the service design
lifecycle stage.
What Is the Objective of ITIL Capacity and Performance Management?
The objective of ITIL capacity and performance management is to ensure that
your IT capacity meets your business needs. Satisfying current and future
demand in a timely and cost-effective way is key to this ITIL practice.
ITIL Capacity and Performance Management Sub-Practices
Capacity and performance management is complex. ITIL breaks the practice
into three sub practices. These include business, service, and component
capacity management.
Business Capacity Management: Business capacity management is a strategic
process that translates business strategy into IT service requirements. As part
of IT capacity planning, business capacity management accounts for future
changes to service requirements.
Service Capacity Management: Service capacity management focuses on
monitoring live IT services and gathering data to identify trends. Monitoring
solutions help IT teams detect usage and performance problems in order to
prevent incidents from occurring.
Component Capacity Management: Component capacity management focuses on the
performance, utilization, and capacity of individual technology components. For
example, components include hard disk storage and internet throughput.
Component capacity management can be reactive when an incident occurs or
proactive based on trends that help predict how services impact component
usage.
ITIL Capacity and Performance Management Roles and Responsibilities
People are fundamental to the ITIL framework. You must define appropriate
roles to manage practices. ITIL capacity and performance management roles vary
by business. Roles may include process owner, manager and practitioner, and
service owner.
Capacity Manager: The capacity manager is responsible for ensuring that you
have adequate IT capacity to meet service levels, communicating with IT teams
about balancing capacity and demand, and optimizing capacity. This person is
responsible and accountable for the overall practice, subpractices, and
results.
Service Owner: The service owner is responsible for the service capacity
management subprocess.
Applications Analyst: The applications analyst is responsible for the
component capacity management subprocess.
Technical Analyst: The technical analyst is also responsible for the
component capacity management subprocess.
ITIL V4 Capacity and Performance Management Practice Steps and Activities
The capacity and performance management team performs many tasks. These
activities concern applications, hardware, and external services. Below are the
team’s six major areas of responsibility, including role assignment, monitoring,
analysis, and more:
Assign Roles and Responsibilities: Use the roles outlined above to identify
the appropriate team member for each role. It is not uncommon for one person to
wear multiple hats.
Research and Monitor Current Service Performance: Monitor and collect data
associated with your company’s cloud services, end-user devices, networks,
servers, and storage devices.
Perform Capacity and Performance Modeling: Identify trends that help you
predict future capacity requirements, and then build models based on those
expected changes.
Analyze Capacity Requirements: Evaluate your current capacity in the context
of your future needs, and then calculate the impact such changes will have on
your business and services.
Forecast Demand and Plan Resources: Understand and anticipate the growth or
shrinkage in demand for IT services, and then apply infrastructure resources
accordingly while also reducing costs.
Plan Performance Improvements: Develop your capacity management plan so that
it satisfies your infrastructure and resource efficiency requirements.
The ITIL capacity and performance management planning template helps you
anticipate future capacity requirements. The template contains examples of both
capacity planning and business impact information. It includes the data that
most professionals use when planning for future capacity.
Best Practices for ITIL Capacity and Performance Management
Industry experts emphasize the importance of learning the ITIL framework as
part of the overall IT initiative. See the additional best practices below.
Professor Gladstone provides two fundamental tips when it comes to ITIL
capacity and performance management: “Learn ITIL, and ensure that you have data
collection, monitoring, alerts, and reporting in place for the
components/services/businesses you support.” Regarding the value that tools
bring to the practice, he says, “There are lots of very sophisticated tools out
there for these processes, but when it comes right down to it, you may be able
to do the job with a competent data manipulation tool (i.e., a very good
spreadsheet).”
Benefits of ITIL Capacity and Performance Management
Technological demands shift with business growth, new projects, and ad hoc
work. ITIL capacity and performance management ensures that resources function
regardless of the volatility of those demands. The practices below help
companies remain productive amid constant change.
Larry Klosterboer is a certified IT architect who specializes in systems
management at IBM’s Technology Integration Management Center in Austin, Texas.
In his book, ITIL Capacity Management, he suggests, “The more processes you
implement and the more tightly you integrate them, the more benefit your
organization sees.”
ITIL capacity and performance management reduces potential downtime through
planning: “You can start the analysis of potential benefits by reviewing your
incident tickets over the past year or so. If you have a way to record capacity
and performance-related tickets, focus there first. If you don’t have that
capability yet, look for tickets on which the description field includes ‘slow
down,’ ‘delay,’ or ‘response time,’” Klosterboer recommends. “Assume that you
could have eliminated half of those tickets through better capacity planning,
and you can start to project what the benefit would be to your organization.”
These benefits range from making more informed decisions to improving
performance and reducing costs.
How Is Capacity Management Implemented in ITIL?
ITIL practices focus on delivering end-to-end service. You do not implement
ITIL. Instead, you use it as a framework to guide your IT organization.
Whether you are following an older version of ITIL (v3) or the latest
evolution (v4), you should follow the best practices above, lean into executive
support, and focus on changing attitudes and behaviors. Most important, focus
on customer outcomes and business value. ITIL is not a start-to-finish process;
it is about continual improvement.
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