Capacity planning is the process of determining the potential needs of a project.
The goal of capacity planning is to have the right resources available when you’ll need them. Resources could mean individuals with the right skills, time available to add another project, or the necessary budget.
Experts in this field believe that capacity planning is a great way to invest your time because it helps you address possible future issues, take advantage of the benefits that come with planning, improve team performance, and streamline your business tasks for increased efficiency.
As a project manager, knowing the capacity requirements for different projects can help prevent bottlenecks and keep a supply chain flowing.
Capacity planning is particularly beneficial to organizations that practice sprint planning — organizing and assigning all tasks to the right team members in a certain period of time.
In many cases, sprint planning is dependent on each team member doing their part. This means that once a task is done, another team member can start their task, and so on. If one team member falls behind, it could derail the process to some degree, but this is where capacity planning comes in.
With capacity planning, sprint planning is made tighter, more efficient, and achievable. When you prepare for possibilities like missed deadlines, not having enough workers or product, or even bottlenecks in the supply chain, you’re better equipped to handle such issues should they come up.
Experts in this field say that aligning capacity with demand should be the end stage of a capacity planning strategy.
This involves looking at the previous gap in capacity and optimize current and available capacity so they are balanced. If your team is currently at capacity and can’t take on additional work to complete the project, add more team members in the short term to get the project done.
If you have excess capacity, consider adding another project to effectively optimize your available resources.
Want to know more about Capacity Planning? Tonex offers Capacity Planning Training, a 4-day course that covers tactics for doing performance analysis, system sizing, performance measurements, trend analysis in today’s challenging business and IT environment.
Tonex also offers several other courses in Cloud Computing Training.
For more information, questions, comments, contact us.