The Scope of Business Capacity Planning

ITIL defines business capacity planning in only the most general terms. Just as IT capacity planning tries to ensure that you have the right IT resources to accomplish the mission of IT, so business capacity planning works to ensure that you have the business resources to accomplish the primary mission of your organization. For a manufacturing organization, this is simply the measure of how many goods can be produced. For other kinds of organizations, the definition can become more complex.

This section describes the scope of business capacity planning to provide background for the rest of the chapter. In addition to covering a basic definition of business capacity planning, we explore the concepts of utilization and prediction of capacity needs as they apply to the business.