In this lesson,
we'll cover capacity planning.
Now, capacity planning
is a critical strategic planning effort
that ensures that an organization is adequately equipped
to meet any future demands at the right time
and in the most cost effective manner.
When it comes to conducting capacity planning,
you need to consider four main aspects
of your organization's capacity,
including its people, its technology,
its infrastructure, and its processes.
By balancing your current operational requirements
against your projects for the future,
you can effectively use capacity planning
to ensure your business continues to operate smoothly
over the long term.
Now first, let's consider the people element
within our capacity planning.
When you conduct capacity planning,
it's going to be centered around your organization's people,
and so you need to analyze your current personnel
to understand their current skillset and available capacity,
as well as forecasting your future needs
so you can plan for the hiring, training,
and downsizing of your workforce if needed.
Now, when it comes to capacity planning
for your organization's human resource component,
you should be focused on ensuring
that you have the right number of people
with the right skills available
to meet your organization's strategic objectives.
For example, if you're running a retail store,
and you're conducting your capacity planning for the year,
you might create a strategic plan
to hire an additional 20 people to help you fulfill
your anticipated surge in consumer demand
during the upcoming holiday shopping season
that occurs in November and December each year.
So your store might hire a bunch of seasonal
or part-time employees on October 1st each year,
so that those new employees will be ready
to handle the increased sales period,
provide better customer service,
ensure smoother operations
at a time when your regular staff
would otherwise be overwhelmed.
Then after January 1st, when that demand usually decreases,
these seasonal positions will be offboarded
from the organization so that the retail store
can minimize its operational costs
and the number of personnel until the demand rises again
in the fourth quarter of that next year.
Second, we need the technology element
to be considered during our capacity planning.
When it comes to technology, your capacity planning
is going to require that you have an understanding
of your current technological resources that are being used
within your organization, including various types
of software and hardware that you might utilize,
the rate at which these resources are being utilized,
and any potential future technological demands
that might be placed upon your organization.
As you consider the technology used by your organization,
you also need to assess whether or not
your existing technology can handle the projected growth
or if your organization needs to invest in some additional
or newer technological solutions
to meet the forecasted demand.
For example, if you're running an e-commerce website,
you should understand how many concurrent
or simultaneous users your platform
is going to be able to support
before it's unable to process your end user's requests.
If your platform is not designed to be able to scale up
to create more capacity during a promotion or sales period,
that could generate a lot of higher traffic levels for you,
and then you could be losing out on potential sales,
because your servers can't handle the excess capability,
and your potential customers can't access your website,
because there's too many other people logged in
and trying to make a purchase.
In our modern networks, though,
we can help overcome this issue
by relying on cloud-based services
that allow us to easily increase our storage
or bandwidth capacity during any high demand periods
that we might encounter,
and then we can automatically reduce
these additional resources back to the lower levels
in order to lower our operational expenses
during the lower demand periods.
Third, let's consider the infrastructure element
of our capacity planning.
Infrastructure capacity planning is going
to involve planning for the physical space and utilities
that are available to support
your organization's ongoing operations.
These physical spaces includes lots of different things,
including office spaces, warehouses,
production facilities, and data centers.
For example, I used to run
a large theater network operations center
for the US government that supported
military computer networks across the Middle East.
As part of my role, we were very focused
on our infrastructure capacity planning,
because our data center only had room
for a certain number of rack mounted servers,
and because each server took up some amount
of physical space, a certain amount of power consumption,
and generating a certain amount of heat,
we had to keep track of all of this.
We had some pretty complex applications that we used
to calculate exactly how much power would be used
and how much heat would be generated by any server
that somebody wanted to install inside of our data center.
Now, because our data center only had so much square footage
available for installing equipment,
we had to be very judicious in our infrastructure planning
to be able to capture the capacity planning we had
and able to ensure that only servers that were needed
to be installed locally were being supported.
And we turned down several proposed installations,
because those services could be hosted remotely
in the cloud instead of on-site.
And this saved us additional space in our data center
for other projects that required
extremely low latency connections to support the end users.
Fourth and finally, let's consider the process element
of our capacity planning.
Process capacity planning is going to focus on optimizing
and ensuring that business processes
can withstand any fluctuations in demand.
This fluctuation could be an increase or decrease in demand,
because both of these could affect
our existing operations within our organization.
By streamlining our workflows,
improving our efficiency through automation
or outsourcing tasks to a third-party vendor,
we can ensure that our processes are being designed
to support varying levels of demand
that are being placed upon them.
For example, if your organization is currently using
a manual process to onboard your new employees
and create their new user accounts on your systems,
this could create a huge bottleneck
if a large amount of people are all hired at the same time.
Let's assume you're running the technology network
for a large call center
that supports a large e-commerce platform.
Now, they know they're going to have a larger demand
during November and December
because of the increased holiday shopping
by their consumers.
So they decided to hire and onboard
an additional 500 seasonal employees
to work in the call center, and you've now been tasked
with creating each new employee a user account
so they can log in and perform their new work roles.
Well, doing this as a manual workflow might take you days,
because the large number of users that you need
to now create user accounts for.
But if you can automate this process
so you can support the simultaneous creation
of up to 500 user accounts at once,
this would eliminate one of the bottlenecks
in our onboarding workflow.
So let me give you another example
to bring all four of these areas
of capacity planning together in a real world scenario.
Let's pretend that you're working
for a healthcare provider that's planning to introduce
telemedicine services to its end users.
Now, first, we need to consider the people portion
of our capacity planning.
Here, we might find that we need to train our existing staff
on using new telemedicine protocols
and hiring additional staff
with experience in conducting remote healthcare services.
These actions would help us prepare our workforce
to manage virtual consultations more effectively
by having the right people
and the right number of people assigned to this project.
Second, we move into the world of technology
inside of our capacity planning,
and here we want to ensure that we're investing
in a secure and compliant telemedicine platform
that would allow us to utilize
robust cybersecurity measures.
This might also require us to scale up the systems
that we're using so they can handle
an increased amount of end user traffic
and their associated healthcare data storage needs.
Third, we need to consider infrastructure
as part of our capacity planning.
And here we might need to modify the physical facilities
to accommodate the use of telemedicine technologies,
such as setting up dedicated spaces for healthcare providers
to be able to conduct remote consultations
in a quiet and secure area
that is free of any interruptions or disturbances.
Fourth, we need to think about our organization's processes
as our final part of our capacity planning.
By developing new workflow protocols for the scheduling,
conducting and following up of our virtual appointments,
we can ensure that our end users, in this case patients,
are being taken care of properly and efficiently.
Some of the changes to consider involve the creation
of any new procedures for patient data management
that align with privacy regulations,
and the implementation of any best practices
for remote healthcare
to provide the best care to our patients.
So as we consider each of the four aspects,
we also have to anticipate the estimated demand
for our telemedicine services,
and then plan to support them accordingly
while we seek to ensure a seamless transition
for both our staff and our patients,
all the while trying to maintain the highest level
of quality for our patients.
So remember, capacity planning is a strategic imperative
that spans your entire organization.
Capacity planning requires foresight, strategic analysis,
and continual adjustments.
And by adequately planning for capacity and people,
technology, infrastructure and processes,
your organization will be able to respond effectively
to market demands, seize opportunities for growth,
and maintain continuous improvement and competitiveness
within an evolving marketplace.
Capacity planning is not just
about meeting the demands of today,
but it's also about being well prepared for the challenges
and opportunities that we may face tomorrow.