Business Capacity Management

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What is Business Capacity Management

The business converses in metrics that are not easily useful or even identifiable to the IT user. An example in a financial services company would be:

• A Business Manager would talk in terms of number of customer accounts, funds under management, etc.
• A Service Manager would talk terms of number of IT services, SLAs, response times, etc.
• A Resource Manager would talk in terms of number of servers, OS, hardware specification & configuration, etc.

These are not the same language and the translation between them is often non-trivial. A Business Manager will be using the units or metrics that he understands, cares about and relates to his bonus! So, for example, he could be interested in the number of customer accounts that the company has and expects to obtain in the future. Customer accounts may be useful for some simple capacity metrics but generally does not map simply to any resource or service.

In this session we will explore the relationship between Business Capacity Management, Service Capacity Management and Resource Capacity Management.

An Approach to Business Capacity Management

This presentation describes a methodology for performing Business Capacity Management by:

• deconstructing business metrics into a 'basket' of related services, based on workload characterisation
• deconstructing each service into the related technology platforms, based on end-to-end analysis
• modelling the service across each platform component
• reconstructing the platform components into the relevant services
• reconstructing the business metrics, based on the component services in accurate weightings

This methodology has proven effective in the past and provides an accurate model of the business, based on the underlying services and resources. The resultant model can then be used for scenario analysis, providing the marketing department with accurate and instant feedback on changes to strategy.

The Value of Business Capacity Management: A Case Study

This presentation describes how Business Capacity Management was employed to produce an end-to-end capacity/performance model of a revenue critical e-commerce system. A key facet of the model was that it was driven by business volumes and reported forecast service level metrics at a business-metric level.

The model helped to reduce the risk that service levels may not be met, in the face of growing business volumes, at a key time in the customer's expansion strategy. The management information output from this Business Capacity Management modelling and analysis exercise is presented and discussed in terms of its value to the customer. The author also discusses issues encountered through this process that often have beneficial side effects.