The IT Capacity plan

The IT Capacity plan helps organizations minimize the impact it has on the business, a change in market demand. Traditionally, the IT capacity plan has been considered a process specific to the IT (Information Technology) areas, whose purpose was to study the volume of information that the IT infrastructure could manage. It has also been considered as a process of organizations with a large volume of resources. However, both perceptions are changing thanks to the emergence of IT services offered from the cloud such as infrastructure, platform or software as a service.

Technologies such as virtualization have also contributed to this change, which allows the consolidation of IT resources or new forms of contracting services, such as payment for use, and leasing. All these factors have managed to modify the idea that companies have of the IT capacity plan as a passive element, to convert it into an enabling component of the strategic plan.

If the IT capacity plan is such an important tool for consolidated companies, why does it have so little impact among enterprises? For a matter of priority. A business needs to focus its efforts on developing its product and designing a business model that sustains it. The list of new business or startups that have not been able to reach the market is very long, the list of those that have died of success, because of not having a plan on how they should face an unexpected change in the demand for your product.

For any organization, whether large or small, it is essential to keep its business strategy aligned with market demand, any deviation that may occur can result in losses. Although a company with resources can deal with the losses caused by a deviation and invest to correct it, it is small organizations, such as startups, that suffer most from changes in demand, since they do not have the resources to supply that drop in demand.

Therefore, in the face of fluctuation in market demand, it is critical for startups to be able to react in time and reduce the impact of the possible deviation between demand and business. The IT capacity plan simplifies the decision-making process since the actions are planned for different possible scenarios. In addition to reducing response time and simplifying decision making, the capacity plan has other advantages:

1. It helps to identify inefficient business processes with the use of IT resources.
2. Quantifies the volume of information that is managed.
3. Help in the decision-making process.
4. Simulate how the system will behave in specific conditions.
5. It allows reducing operating costs, adjusting IT capacity to demand.
6. Identify limits, restrictions, and risks of the IT infrastructure and its impact on the business.
7. Efficiently manage the change.
8. Establishes the scalability policies of the IT infrastructure.
9. It helps to establish service levels.

For a small organization, such as a startup, which has a small number of business processes, which are also relatively simple to implement and whose IT infrastructure is not too large, building an IT capacity plan is relatively simple and does not require a lot of effort. There is a set of recommendations or good practices that we can follow to develop an IT capacity plan.

1. Establish what is the business strategy
2. Identify business processes
3. Quantify the capacity of IT elements
4. Identify the limits and restrictions of the IT infrastructure, possible risks, dependencies, bottlenecks, etc.

Build a map on which to reflect all the relationships between business processes and IT resources. This map is the core of the capacity plan, it allows us to trace the path from business activity to the IT resources that support it. Build simulation models that help us study the behavior of our IT platform in different situations, such as simulating changes in demand, infrastructure failures, etc.

We must not lose sight of one of the objectives of an IT capacity plan, to respond from IT to the questions about capacity raised from the areas of business development. An example of possible questions that the organization could ask about the business strategy and that the IT capacity plan can help answer.

1. What is the limit of users that we can accept?
2. How can IT infrastructure scale?
3. What cost would we have to assume if our customers increased by 20%?
4. What is the impact of absorbing a peak load?
5. Can we optimize the use of resources?
6. When will the service begin to degrade?
7. Can we deploy a new product feature?

With the next links, you can access two templates build to create your capacity planning:

IT Capacity Planning Word Template

IT Strategy Map Powerpoint Template