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You may think capacity planning involves a lot of duct tape, hand wringing, pixie dust and prognostication along with crossed fingers. However, many in the industry understand that proper prior planning prevents poor performance. And the best way to properly plan for future events is with established capacity planning techniques.

Four main themes sprout forth from proven and successful best practices for capacity planning. Read and take heed.

Work with the Business
Traditionally, capacity planning is done with minimal or no interaction with the business. Because the work is generally performed at a macro level, such as a server, you can be reasonably accurate.

However, seeking input from business units reaps significant benefits. Both IT and the business units can understand and agree on expectations and decrease the likelihood of hiccups.

Understanding business unit objectives and translating them - quickly and accurately - into IT priorities is essential in today’s dynamic marketplace. This includes the ability to effectively communicate planning and performance data in a way that is useful to business unit management.

Understand IT resources requirements
Knowing all the IT resources required (and the related costs) to support a particular business function, such as processing a claim or answering a customer inquiry call, will help decrease complexity. This provides clarity into the actual IT costs associated with supporting a business function and requires business interaction to accomplish. Properly understanding IT resource needs also results in increased efficiencies, right-sized capacity, and often lower software licensing costs.

This is also a great relationship builder. In doing the work together, the business gets greater appreciation for the complexity of IT's work and IT has a better appreciation of what the business faces everyday.

Predict capacity requirements accurately
Ensure sufficient IT infrastructure capacity is in place in time to satisfy actual business needs for future business events. Well thought-out capacity planning techniques to plan and provision services can help prevent performance fires after services are launched, freeing human resources that would otherwise be spent troubleshooting. Capacity planning techniques can be used for:

• Predeployment scalability testing
• Predicting service performance under varying demands
• Identifying optimal hardware configurations to support services
• Controlling costs through accurate provisioning

Include "what if" analyses
Understand the cost impact of various options when assessing future business events or opportunities by using "what if" analyses. Predict precisely when you will need more capacity to deliver services so you can perform just-in-time upgrades and know exactly what hardware must be purchased for optimal performance.

Experiment with what-if analysis for the operational side, particularly when negotiating service level agreements. Does it make business sense to agree to a one second response rate or three seconds, considering the associated costs?

Or an organization can look at from the perspective of developing services. Will we get a reasonable return on money spent developing and operating this proposed service?

Taking this action transforms IT decisions into business decisions. This changes perceptions within an organization from one of "IT costs" to one of "business costs" which brings us back to aligning IT and the business.