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The path leading to a full ITIL implementation can be convoluted and fraught with danger lurking around every misstep and delay. However, many organizations have discovered success by taking a smaller bite of ITIL through one of its disciplines - Capacity Management.

A March 14, 2006, Forrester report cited more than 60 percent of companies adopting ITIL limited their ITIL implementation to partial components, while only 11 percent took on a full ITIL implementation. Capacity Management is the one of the best ITIL disciplines to begin an ITIL implementation.

It's easy to see why. Many companies already perform Capacity Management in some form or another through performance improvements or reduced resources. The resulting savings from consolidation and resource reallocation could be used to fund a considerable percentage of the rest of your company's ITIL program.

As companies continue to focus on reducing infrastructure and operations costs, Capacity Management is a proven ITIL discipline that can lower costs and improve quality through:

• Higher precision tools and more effective best practices
• Continuous runtime improvement processes
• Central performance and capacity data stores eliminating redundant work
• Predictive modeling disciplines
• More comprehensive input to Total Cost of Ownership
• Proactive analyses with modeling tools

Before experiencing these benefits, IT organizations must get input from the business units to identify the required services, what IT infrastructure is needed to support these services, and the cost of the infrastructure.

Without Capacity Management, IT organizations are least likely to:

• Ensure they can support minimum workload requirements in the event of a disaster
• Address performance aspects of Service Level Agreements (SLA)
• Model impact of capacity changes on availability issues
• Understand the causes for performance related incidents and problems
• Assess the impact of change requests and new releases on performance
• Comprehend the impact of future infrastructure purchases meeting service targets

Integrating with other Components of ITIL
Capacity Management processes are tightly integrated with the other service delivery processes and with configuration management, business strategic planning, incident and problem management, and change management.

One of the most important interfaces is to Service Level Management (SLM). Capacity Management passes historical service metrics to SLM so SLAs can be appropriately sized and configured. SLM passes the detailed SLA information back to Capacity Management so that the appropriate capacity positions can be put in place to satisfy the need.

Another important interface is with Cost Management. This interface generally applies to chargeback efforts and the building of TCO documents. The timely and comprehensive exchange of data ensures the costs of IT services are well understood and communicated appropriately to the business. The level of detail will depend on how the business units and corporate finance account for IT expenditures and chargebacks.

The main goal of Capacity Management is to provide a service that is proactive rather than reactive using the following components:

• Performance management
• Workload management
• Capacity plan
• Capacity planning team
• Capacity database
• Modeling
• Demand management
• Resource management

Three Sub-processes of Capacity Management
IT organizations must remember to take into account the strategic, tactical and operational aspects of Capacity Management.

The strategic view takes into account the understanding of future business capacity needs and the impact of them and business growth on Service Level Agreements and infrastructure resources. This is also known as business capacity management. IT organizations must understand existing and future service levels, SLAs and Service Level Requirements, the business unit and capacity plans, modeling techniques and application sizing methods.

The tactical view, also known as service capacity management, looks at applications and the business processes they support from an enterprise perspective, understanding resource consumption patterns and cycles to ensure services can meet SLAs. Organizations should understand business unit service levels and SLAs, systems, networks, service throughputs and performance, monitoring, measurement, analysis, tuning and demand management.

The operational view looks at resources from an individual infrastructure component perspective and then builds and maintains the infrastructure capacity plan. Organizations need to recognize the current technology and its utilization, future or alternative technologies, and the resilience of systems and services. This view is also known as resource capacity management.

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