Anuj Mehta

IT Consultant CIO’s, IT Managers and Project Managers across America want to align IT service, project and operational strategies to achieve dramatic improvements in Resource Management and capacity planning. Many organizations are awakening to the failure of Capacity Planning and will renew efforts to make marked improvements in these areas over the next two years as solving the Capacity Planning problem is cited as a major factor for continued improvements to customer satisfaction and project timeliness. (Survey, Entry Software,)

IT organizations and systems are on the critical path when it comes to enabling sales, delivery and operational business strategies, so IT is no stranger to the achievement of strategy. However, there is seldom in place an IT “business strategy” that unifies the different faces of IT: project management, development, service, training, etc. Now, more than ever, IT organizations are adopting “continual improvement” paradigms based on Demming’s PDAC, (plan, do, act, check). Through the first couple of iterations of continual improvement, they find themselves in need of a global IT strategy and turn to ITSM, ITOM, Project Management and other concepts for guidance and best practices. While the strategy is part of each of these frameworks, we found there were still gaps in IT tactics when it comes to capacity and resource management.

Our recent survey (CHALLENGES FACING IT LEADERS WHEN MANAGING PLANNED AND UNPLANNED WORK IN DISPARATE SYSTEMS) revealed that issues related to Resource Management and scheduling had been recognized as a major failing within IT organizations. More specifically the report cites that

“…it is all but impossible for Project Managers to effectively and efficiently predict the future availability of a resource.”

Conversely, the resolution of the issues related to Resource Management and scheduling of project resources has been identified as a significant goal for many of organizations through the 2015 calendar year. To quote the report:

“Significant benefits cited for the improvement of resource capacity planning are reduced cost of labor and contracting, improved customer service and support of project management as a process.”

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2014, (Hype Cycle for IT Operations Management, 2014, Gartner, Ronni J. Colville, (2014)) demonstrates that organizational adoption of ITOM tools that include Capacity Planning and Management tools is almost always disappointing with applications and their results landing somewhere in the trough of disillusionment.

The bottom line: IT Resource Management has a long way to go. The inclusion of project management technologies and styles as well as capturing all IT work are two critical factors to the continued improvement of IT organizations.

TeamHeadquarters from Entry Software is an evolutionary solution for ITOM in the SMB market space. It addresses all work in an IT organization including planned, unplanned and operational work. With TeamHeadquarters, IT organizations can plan work, resources, support clients and consolidate IT strategies across projects, support and operations. Learn more about TeamHeadquarters at your leisure.