A few months ago we claimed that there were two broad areas of skills that capacity management practitioners seemed to require. We called them “technical” skills which centre around technologies and tools, which aren’t necessarily capacity management specific and “capacity management” skills which are transferable across technologies.
We argued that they are both valuable but whereas technical skills are relatively simple to pick up the capacity management skills are less so.
The path to enlightenment
The author has been involved with capacity and performance management for over twenty years and has noticed a small number of pathways along which individuals gain their capacity management abilities. The first is through what may be considered a technical route, either the individual has been in IT operations or a systems administration role and has got into capacity management through either knowing a lot about a particular service, technology or toolset. These types often focus on extracting historical information, producing reports and often understand the details of performance issues.
Another source of capacity managers is through the application development route. Ex-programmers tend to be skilled in query based languages which can allow complex analysis of data in a CMIS. More strikingly they have experience of the application development lifecycle and appreciate the benefits of software performance engineering and early performance testing.
Neither of these pathways is necessarily better or worse than the other, however, to be able to see both of these viewpoints in one individual is valuable. In the author’s experience most enterprises have a mixture of these types of background in their capacity management teams but this doesn’t inevitably result in the best capacity management service.
What’s missing?
In our earlier discussion we mentioned that specific capacity management skills included things like analytical and simulation modelling, forecasting, threshold alerting, workload characterisation, process design etc. The typical paths that we described above don’t usually result in people with these skills, so why not?
Large enterprises often have a narrow view of capacity management, they often think that as long as there’s a hardware monitoring facility in place then it simply a matter of trending historical data to identify when upgrades are necessary. Often this can seem to work but when it doesn’t there is often hell to pay, “Why didn’t you take into consideration Project XXX?”, “Why did the performance test not capture this?”, “How does business growth affect the resource we need?”, “Why didn’t you predict response time?”. These are all sensible questions but they tend to be asked after some capacity management disaster has happened, or they are asked at the right time but circumstances have led to the right decisions being made through good fortune and this doesn’t guarantee things to go well the next time.
It is usually only then that organisations start to consider whether they’re taking capacity management seriously enough.
Traditional sources of skills
Formal capacity management training has not been particularly conspicuous over the last twenty years. Training courses have tended to be run by either hardware or software vendors and these, naturally, tend to focus on the vendors’ own offerings. Some vendors, notably, IBM, SAS and BMC have also embraced their own user groups and this has led to more generalised issues being discussed and allowed some level of networking between practitioners.
Independent user groups have had some success in broadening the awareness of capacity management. Led by CMG in the USA these events have encouraged users to gather together and share experiences. The user presentation has always been the most valuable session at these types of events but they are becoming as rare as a raindrop in the desert. In the United Kingdom UKCMG attempted to halt dwindling numbers at their conferences by adding a “tutorial” stream. This differed from the traditional user/consultant/vendor paper in that it would take the form of a training course and would typically last a minimum of half a day. These have proved popular with attendees but have not been effective in increasing numbers.
Now and again the odd individual or a small band of like-minded experts have got together to release a capacity management book or a training course. The books have been of differing usefulness but suffer from the fact that people new to capacity management often need things put into context and it’s hard to understand what are the most important aspects being discussed (to adequately cover all aspects in a book would result in a weighty tome and this can put-off “newbies”).
The training courses, while often created by experts, have tended to be short lived perhaps due to the fact that those delivering them make their living from consultancy and need to concentrate on that. Also training skills themselves are not easy to develop and it’s fair to say that the best exponents don’t always make the best teachers.
What’s the solution?
There is no easy route to being an all-round capacity management practitioner. The first step is in understanding what you don’t know and what you don’t do already. This might be done by being audited either by an internal group or an external agency (although few people enjoy this process it is often the only catalyst for change and improvement). A self-assessment may be a less distressing way to do this.
Attendance at user groups is advised however “attendance” can mean different things to different people. Attending and listening should just be the starting point. Taking part in group discussions (“Birds of a feather” sessions) and networking should lead to writing papers, giving presentations and offering to host similar events.
The importance of networking is often underestimated, the post conference chat in a social environment is often more valuable than any formal sessions. That is why volunteering to host an event like this is such a good idea – you could set the agenda to suit your needs, invite appropriate speakers and set the place and time – what could be better?
Finally a development programme should be followed, this can include the steps mentioned earlier (audit, self-assessment, reading, user groups) but formal training should also be considered. This training should ideally set the context of what is being learned within the “bigger capacity management picture” and would ideally be independent of hardware and software vendors. Accreditation as a result of learning is also a good item to have on one’s CV.
Training budgets are often the first thing to be cut during austere times but if training courses can be shown to be part of a defined development programme it might go some way to ring-fencing the money. Perhaps the first step is to let the budget holder read this article…
