Capacity Management – Components

Capacity Management consists of three inter-related sub processes or components, each working at different levels in the organisational structure.

Business Capacity Management (BCM)
Focus: Understands the requirements of the business current & future
Goal: Accurating forecasting of business growth & requirements.
Focus is on the future services required by the business and predicting future capacity necessary to support this biusiness growth & requirements. This process is responsible for the production of a Capacity Plan, which is intended to forecast the future requirements for resources to support IT Services that underpin the business activities. To work effectively, BCM requires an insight into the business as a whole, and should be able to gather medium term plans and predictions about growth or shrinkage in business drivers of IT.

Service Capacity Management (SCM)
Focus: IT services critical for sustenance of the business operations
Goal: Performance of IT services that deliver core business functions
This component is concerned with the services currently in place to support the business. It tries to ensure SLAs aren't breached because of capacity problems, and tries to improve scarce resource utilisation through the use of Demand Management.

Resource Capacity Management (RCM)
Focus: IT infrastructure resources supporting the business applications
Goal: Performance & Utilization of the IT infrastructure resourcesThis component concentrates on the underpinning technology resources that 'enable' business services. It also ensures that these resources, or Configuration items, are not over used ie “demand” on IT resources is normalized and optimized. This is often achieved by optimizing the behaviour and usage of the application.