'DIMAICR': A 6 STEP APPROACH TO IMPLEMENT CAPACITY MANAGEMENT IN YOUR ORGANIZATION

STEP 1: Define

• Define Capacity Management process
• Identify team responsible for capacity management
• Train relevant team members
• Establishing capacity requirements to meet service level requirements of new or changed services
• Map future business requirements
• Through periodic consultation with business stakeholders
• Translate business requirements into IT requirements
• Forecast IT requirements
• Forecast component capacity requirements considering current capacity utilization and performance
• For forecasting use techniques like trending, application and/or service sizing, capacity modelling, etc.
• Map technology needs:
• Research for emerging technologies and products
• Consider relevant emerging technologies and products as an alternative mean to efficiently and effectively meet IT capacity requirements considering cost, performance and other significant aspects
• Prepare and maintain an up to date Capacity Plan
• Conduct periodic reviews

STEP 2: Implement

• Implement Capacity Management process
• Deploy a Capacity Manager
• Responsible for process management and publishing periodic reports
• Identify all critical services
• Identify CIs mapping to these critical services
• Mark these CI as critical
• Capacity Plan

STEP 3: Monitor & Analyze:

• Collect capacity and performance data (like utilization, response time reports etc.,)
• Identify capacity/performance issues
• Identify underutilized and over utilized components
• Analyse collected data to identify current or potential capacity and performance issues
• Corrective actions

STEP 4: Improve:

• Propose & implement corrective actions in order to prevent business impact due to poor performance or lack of capacity; Corrective actions could be:
• Performance tuning
• Redeploying under-utilized capacity
• Procuring additional capacity
• Influencing demand
• Access. manage and improve capacity management process
• Cost optimization techniques

STEP 5: Control:

• Perform risk assessment , identify and implement mitigation options
• Maintain a risk register
• Analyze and resolve capacity related incidents and problems
• Analyze impact of changes and implement related recommendations

STEP 6: Report: Periodically report on-

• Corrective actions
• Performance of resources
• Resource utilization
• Capacity projections vs. utilization
• Issues with/due to capacity management
• Process performance

Asset and CI: The Relationship

My following three points would help us in understanding the relationship between asset and CI:

1. All assets are not CIs
2. All CIs are not assets
3. Some assets are CIs and some CIs are assets

Confused!!!

Please refer to my previous post "Understanding A Configuration Item (CI)". This post would help you understand how we can validate if an item qualifies to be a CI.

Let me clarify each of these points with an example:

All Assets are not CIs:

Items like phones or our office ACs are assets but these are not delivering any IT service and thus does not qualify to be a CI

All CIs are not Assets:

Various documents like Process Documents, SOP, Agreements, etc. qualify to be a CI. Also, items like freewares, ports, virtual machines, etc. qualify to be a CI. But none of these has a financial value attached to it and thus they do not qualify as an asset.

Some Assets are CIs and some CIs are Assets

Some of the assets like physical servers, licensed softwares, etc. are an asset and qualify to be a CI as well.

Thus, using set theory we can define relationship between Asset and CI as:

Understanding A Configuration Item (CI)

A Configuration Item (CI) can be defined as any component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT service. It should be manageable and traceable. It is an asset or a service component that is under the control of configuration management.

Attributes of a CI

•  Category 
•  Relationships
•  Status

For any asset or service component to qualify as a CI ALL of the following conditions have to be met:

1. It MUST be required to deliver an IT service
2. It MUST be identifiable as a unique entity 
3. It MUST be manageable 
4. It MUST have some characteristic that can change

Examples:

Item	Delivers IT Service?	Is Unique?	Is Manageable?	Has Characteristics That Can Change?	Qualifies As A CI?
Server	P	P	P	P	P
Process Doc.	P	P	P	P	P
Telephone	O	P	P	P	O
Building	P	P	P	O	O
AC	P/O	P	P	P	P/O
Projector	P/O	P	P	P	P/O

Example of a Building - A building does not has characteristics that can change. Its area, floors, wings, etc. will remain the same. We do find building or location information captured in CMDB but then it is the information about a CI which tells us where it is physically or virtually located.

Example of AC - An AC in a data center will qualify as a CI since cooling is one of the key parameters which affects performance of a Server by ensuring that CPU temperature is under control. But in all other cases where it is just keeping our offices, conference rooms, etc. cool, it does not qualify as a CI as it is not delivering any IT service.

Example of Projector - For an organization which is into delivering Training services, Projector would qualify to be a CI. For all other cases it would not.

Thus, a key point to note is that whether any item would qualify to be a CI would also depend on the type of service that the organization is into.