Don’t You Forget About Me
Out of sight, out of mind. If something isn’t staring you in the face, it is very easy to forget all about it. But that is a mistake. And it is a mistake that is made over and over again when organisations outsource their Capacity Management to an external service provider. This is rarely done in isolation, and is more commonly done as part of an overall outsourcing of large tranches of the IT service.
Capacity Management is just another of those ITIL disciplines that the outsourcer claims to have years of experience in, together with their Incident management and Change management processes. But how much experience do they have of your specific business? How many years of experience can they call upon when capacity planning the business forecasts related to your central product area? In truth, very little. Actually… to be completely truthful, none.
The knowledge that is specific to your business has been built up within the Capacity team, and that not only enables the internal team to build accurate Capacity models, but it also enables them to build them in a timely manner. An external provider will not have this capability.
“No problem”, say the Executive Board, “we’ll TUPE all the staff over to the outsourcer.”
If you have highly skilled Capacity Managers, then you already know that they are a rare resource and in high demand in the jobs market. If they are not content with the outsourcer, then they won’t stick around for too long. The outsourcer will also not be looking to retain those staff for any longer than they need to. Outsourcing of commodity skill sets works because it is possible to hire these common skills offshore at a cheaper rate without a drop in service. Where the skill set is rare (in niche disciplines like Capacity Management, or in highly skilled areas like design) then the approach of off-shoring to a cheaper resource is a false economy. You will not receive the same quality of service that you were getting with the more expensive local experts.
Is this really a problem?
If you don’t need a quality Capacity Management service, and don’t care about the accuracy, then no. Any cheap analyst can produce a table of figures and maybe even a graph or two. It won’t be accurate, but if all you want to see from your dashboards is a sea of green and receive a nice warm feeling that things are being looked after, then carry on… no problem.
But if you need accurate results and are relying on a good quality of service from your services and infrastructure to remain in business… then you have a problem. A big problem.
And this is why you should never forget about Capacity Management when outsourcing. In all of the client environments that I have operated, wherever they have outsourced the Capacity Management function, they have ALWAYS required a local in-house Capacity Management function to remain. True, this function is a much smaller operation than prior to the Outsourcing. A skeleton crew remain within the organisation to ensure that the service being provided by the Outsourcer is both accurate and of a quality that enables the business to rely upon it.
The in-house team need to be sufficiently skilled that they can immediately know whether the values being reported are correct. If the outsourcing contract only stipulated that Capacity Reporting would be performed, then who is going to do the Forecasting and Planning? In this scenario, that can only be the in-house team…. So they better be sufficiently skilled that they can create capacity models from minimal input information (since there is a strong chance that the regular monitoring function that would provide inputs to those models have also been outsourced!).
If this sounds like me saying that Outsourcing of Capacity Management can never work, then that is not the case. I have seen Outsourcing deliver real benefits for the client, however only if some key issues are addressed:
- Who is responsible for regular reporting?
- Who is responsible for forecasting and planning?
- Who is responsible for deriving the demand plan?
- Are ad-hoc performance investigations and models included in the agreement?
- What is the escalation path for Capacity issues?
- What is the escalation path for issues relating to the Capacity service (NB: this is different from Capacity Issues, and if the same escalation path is used, then the quality of the Capacity Service is unlikely to get addressed).
So. If your company is about to consider outsourcing its IT Service, and is including Capacity Management in that suite, then you really want to check that they know how to do it.. and whatever you do… don’t forget about Capacity Management the moment you sign the deal.