- Scope of a Capacity Plan
- Format of a Capacity Plan
- Maintaining Capacity Plans
- Storing Capacity Plans
- Summary and Next Steps
Summary and Next Steps
Capacity plans provide the capacity management team with the opportunity to analyze the mountain of data they work with every day and make solid recommendations to the IT management team. This chapter has described capacity plans and provided some insight into how your organization can create them.
We started with an overview of what makes up a good capacity plan. You learned that, in addition to specific data elements such as utilization and capacity limits, a solid plan should also include predictions and analysis. You should create a separate plan for each major IT service and for each significant IT component, with each plan providing an in-depth approach for what to do when capacity is too high or too low.
We considered the way to format your capacity plans. You learned that although data can be in the form of a table or structured text, your analysis and recommendations will almost always be free-form text within a document of some kind. You should provide an overview for casual readers, but also provide technical depth to justify the recommendations you make within the plan.
We considered how to manage capacity plans and saw that they follow a life cycle that can be tracked through effective document management practices. Capacity plans should be reviewed regularly and updated when changes are needed. Minor changes can be bundled together into a regular release cycle for the document, and major changes should be planned and implemented as part of the major IT change that is causing you to rethink the capacity plan.
As indicated in Chapter 5, capacity plans should be stored in the CMIS. If your CMIS tool allows attachments, you should store the actual document there. If not, you should at least create some kind of index within the CMIS so that users of that repository can easily locate and view your capacity plans.
Now that we've addressed the two most misunderstood ITIL capacity management terms (CMIS and capacity plan), the next chapter returns to fundamentals. We explore how to define and staff the roles you need to create an effective capacity management team.