Capacity management forces organizations to make deliberate decisions to maximize their capabilities. The ultimate goal is to have resources to create value for customers and stakeholders while balancing risks and budgetary constraints. Capacity planning decisions in business operations management focus on measuring how much a company can achieve, produce, or sell in a given period of time. By using capacity management with skill, organizations considerably increase the chances that the time and professional skills of team members (and freelancers) can be used optimally to meet the organization's strategic objectives.
When planning the size of hardware and infrastructure, it is critical that a capacity planning manager manages and oversees the daily volume of data ingestion, the volume of data for a single historical load, the period of data retention, the implementation of several data centers, and the period over which the cluster is sized. Capacity management theory consists of the planning, IT monitoring, and administration actions that are carried out to ensure that information technology resources have the capacity to manage data processing requirements throughout the service lifecycle. An adjustment strategy is one of the most common approaches to capacity management because it responds to demands, but not in perfect real time. Capacity management tools and methodologies vary, ranging from manually compiled performance spreadsheets to specially compiled hardware or software that are designed to produce detailed information about the operation of computer components.
Because capacity can change due to changing conditions or external influences, such as seasonal demand, industry changes, and unexpected macroeconomic events, companies must maintain sufficient agility to consistently meet expectations in a cost-effective manner. Companies that mismanage capacity may experience a decline in revenues due to lack of order fulfillment, loss of customers, and declining market share. Consequently, capacity management must involve identifying the best places to allocate resources in order to achieve the strategic objectives of the organization. In addition to that, capacity management also forces the organization to stop taking important things, such as the number of engineers available to complete a project, for granted, while managing problems such as server interruptions, errors, and other forms of unplanned work.
An appropriate strategy for capacity management seeks to constantly adjust the amount of resources available to accurately reflect current and future demands. A core capacity management strategy seeks to anticipate resource needs and proactively meet them before they are required. Often, these factors not only become part of the organization's best capacity management practices, but also of its strategic planning. In the reactive sense, capacity management creates a data record and a historical record for each process, so that organizational leaders can learn profound lessons about what their teams are capable of doing, what talent may be needed, and exactly how long it takes to do great work.
In the world of development and human resources, capacity often refers specifically to people, that is, to people who are available to do productive work. These tools examine the operation of hardware and software, and monitor and measure the volume and speeds at which an organization's applications move data across the IT infrastructure.