{"id":4424,"date":"2015-04-07T19:25:17","date_gmt":"2015-04-07T19:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/multiacademstg.wpengine.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2015\/04\/07\/itil-reactive-and-proactive-capacity-management\/"},"modified":"2025-06-14T08:02:56","modified_gmt":"2025-06-14T08:02:56","slug":"itil-reactive-and-proactive-capacity-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/blog\/2015\/04\/07\/itil-reactive-and-proactive-capacity-management\/","title":{"rendered":"ITIL Reactive and Proactive Capacity Management"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Even though <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/what-is-itil\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ITIL<\/a>\u00a0<strong>Capacity Management<\/strong> is part of <strong>Service Design<\/strong>, it extends across the service lifecycle. With all major service features and constraints defined within <strong>Service Strategy<\/strong>\u00a0patterns of business activity (PBA), levels of service (LOS), and service level packages (SLPs), it\u2019s up to Capacity Management to ensure cost-justifiable IT capacity for all current and future needs. Yes, Capacity Management is responsible for managing both current and future, with emphasis on <strong>future<\/strong> needs.<\/p>\n<p>Before we continue, this would be a good time to read the following blog post, if you haven\u2019t already, in order to familiarize yourself with Capacity Management basics: <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/knowledgebase\/three-faces-capacity-management\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Three faces of Capacity Management<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">Monitoring and measurement<\/h3>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-52262\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2015\/04\/Capacity_planning.png\" alt=\"Capacity planning\" width=\"624\" height=\"244\" \/><span style=\"font-size: 14px;\"><em>Figure 1 &#8211; Capacity planning based on demand pattern<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p>For our next example, I\u2019ll make a safe bet that you are a smartphone user with some sort of data plan that includes a certain amount of data in your subscription. This is capacity that you have available each month for certain fee, and once you consume it all, you are left in digital darkness until the next month.<\/p>\n<p>If you have no means of tracking your data usage, you are pretty much blindfolded, and can only rely on personal experience that emails generally consume a small amount of data, web browsing is a bit heavier, and photo and video sharing sites will impact your data consumption the most. It should be obvious by now that good Capacity Management strongly depends on monitoring capabilities, because what can\u2019t be measured \u2013 can\u2019t be controlled.<br \/>\n<div id=\"middle-banner\" class=\"banner-shortcode\"><\/div><script>loadMiddleBanner();<\/script><br \/>\n<div id=\"side-banner-trigger\" class=\"banner-shortcode\"><\/div><\/p>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">Reactive Capacity Management<\/h2>\n<p>Whether you measure your mobile data consumption or not, providers generally will inform you once you consume all of it (or when you spend 90% of it), but the question remains: How will you respond to that information? If that happens close to the end of the month, you\u2019ll probably just ignore it and keep using only necessary services such as email. But, what if that happened closer to the beginning of the month?<\/p>\n<p>Since you have no information about your data consumption, or you choose to ignore it, in order to continue using mobile data services you\u2019ll have to purchase additional data for your plan. This is the perfect example of Reactive Capacity Management. When demand generated by the end-users overflows available capacity, then service degradation, or even <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/iso-20000-documentation-toolkit\/?rel=service-assurance-processes&amp;doc=availability-plan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">unavailability<\/a>\u00a0may occur. If the business is willing to cover the costs, Capacity Management can respond in a single manner and that is to increase necessary <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/iso-20000-documentation-toolkit\/?rel=supply-demand-processes&amp;doc=capacity-plan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">capacity<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">Proactive Capacity Management<\/h2>\n<p>Let\u2019s stay with our example for a bit, and say that you have the means to monitor your data consumption. If you are commuting a lot like I do, watching videos online will have a great impact on data consumption, but how great? Luckily, my smartphone tracks how much data is consumed by every single application, and with that information I know that watching videos monthly consumes 2.9 GB, surfing the web uses 250 MB, email costs 55 MB, RSS consumes 25 MB, and all other apps combine to use 125 MB.<\/p>\n<p>This totals approximately 3.35 GB of monthly data consumption, and my data plan includes only 2 GB. Does this mean that each month I purchase two additional 1 GB packages? Well, no. Initially, I did have only 2 GB, but I soon realized this consumption pattern (video, web, email, other) meant that my actual consumption was much higher. I also did some analysis on how much video I watch, the average size of mobile videos, and my web browsing patterns, and came to the conclusion that a 5 GB data plan will ensure my personal comfort for only a small increase in monthly cost.<\/p>\n<p>Now that I\u2019ve shared this information with you, I\u2019ve come to the conclusion that I might downgrade my subscription to a plan that includes 4 GB and save a few Euros. Now that\u2019s Proactive Capacity Management I like.<\/p>\n<h2 style=\"padding-top: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px;\">Fine tune<\/h2>\n<p>As shown in Figure 1, successful Capacity Management will have <strong>Service Process<\/strong> perfectly matched with <strong>Business Process<\/strong>, as if they were two wheels connected with a belt.\u00a0 In reality, you\u2019ll probably never have such a case, and that is why we need control mechanisms; we can either try to control demand via <strong>Demand Management<\/strong>, or simply react to demand via <strong>Capacity Management<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>The best practice suggests that both methods should be used in conjunction, but in a very controlled fashion, which is illustrated in Figure 1 with blue and orange circular arrows. Imagine what the end result would look like, if Demand and Capacity Management ran independently; on increased load, Demand Management would react with the goal to reduce it, while Capacity Management would increase available capacity\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Reactive Capacity Management is important for a swift response in increasing demand, which can\u2019t be offloaded by Demand Management (e.g., increase in number of employees), while Proactive Capacity management is reliant on monitoring and measuring capabilities, trend analysis, and similar methods to predict, fine-tune and restore the balance between all the components in the service belt.<\/p>\n<p>Good Capacity Management starts with a Capacity Plan, so I\u2019d like to use this opportunity to suggest the following article, which describes all the elements of an <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/knowledgebase\/itil-capacity-plan-a-document-you-need-but-probably-dont-have\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ITIL Capacity Plan \u2013 A document you need, but probably don\u2019t have<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><em>To implement ISO 20000 easily and efficiently, use our<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/iso-20000-documentation-toolkit\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ISO 20000 Documentation Toolkit<\/a> <em>that provides step-by-step guidance for full ISO 20000 compliance.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Even though ITIL\u00a0Capacity Management is part of Service Design, it extends across the service lifecycle. With all major service features and constraints defined within Service Strategy\u00a0patterns of business activity (PBA), levels of service (LOS), and service level packages (SLPs), it\u2019s up to Capacity Management to ensure cost-justifiable IT capacity for all current and future needs. &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":4425,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[395,396,397,344,398,346,399,372],"class_list":["post-4424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-capacity-management","tag-capacity-plan","tag-demand-management","tag-itil","tag-service-capacity","tag-service-design","tag-service-level","tag-service-management"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4424"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18463,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4424\/revisions\/18463"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.advisera.com\/20000academy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}