ITIL - Capacity Management

 ITIL Capacity Management aims to ensure that the capacity of IT services and the IT infrastructure is able to deliver the agreed service level targets in a cost effective and timely manner. Capacity Management considers all resources required to deliver the IT service, and plans for short, medium and long term business requirements.

The 3 sub processes of Capacity Management are: 

1. Business Capacity Management
2. Service Capacity Management
3. Component Capacity Management

Let’s take a detailed look at each of these processes.

Business Capacity Management

This sub process translate business needs and plans into capacity and performance requirements for services and IT infrastructure, and to ensure that future capacity and performance needs can be fulfilled. It analyses the Patterns of Business Activity (PBAs) coming from Demand Management. These PBAs show both the volume of work and how this volume fluctuates over time. Business Capacity Management then gathers information about new business activities such as launching a new product, relocating a department or opening a new facility. This may be provided directly from business managers to the Capacity Management team or may come from the Service Level Packages produced for the Service Portfolio. Superimposing forecasts of new activities on top of patterns of current usage helps this sub-process to provide Service Capacity Management with an accurate projection of changing business activities over time.

Service Capacity Management

This sub process manages, control and predict the performance and capacity of operational services. This includes initiating proactive and reactive action to ensure that the performances and capacities of services meet their agreed targets.

It seeks to correlate business activity and service usage. For example, a call center’s usage of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) service is probably dependent on the number of customers, how often they call and what information they require. The relationship between these factors and CRM service usage can be mapped or modeled so that the impact of business activity changes can be predicted in terms of service performance (e.g. transaction response times) over time.

Component Capacity Management

This sub process manages, control and predict the performance, utilization and capacity of IT resources and individual IT components.

When Service Capacity Management identifies that service levels will fall below target, Component Capacity Management is the sub-process responsible for identifying the necessary changes to the technical infrastructure to maintain service levels. To be effective fully, configuration information is necessary to understand which components (configuration items) support which services. The utilization of these components should be continually monitored against their capacity and, ideally, an alert generated when a threshold is reached that could cause service levels to be missed.