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Capacity Management Maturity, Maslow, and you

Capacity Management Maturity, Maslow, and you2

This white paper will discuss Capacity Management Maturity from two different viewpoints, although it will quickly become obvious that there are similarities between the two lines of thinking.

First, we’ll look at Capability Maturity Model Integration (or CMMI), a process improvement training and appraisal program that is already at the heart of multiple Capacity Management process assessment and improvement models, including Metron’s.

Next we’ll take a look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is a theory in psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in a 1943 paper, which dealt with his theories on human motivation.

While one might think there is little in common between CMMI and Maslow, we’ll dive deeper into the topic and explore whether there is a relationship – and more importantly whether there’s some knowledge we can take away from the exercise.

Finally, we’ll look at ways to interpret Capacity Management Maturity and how to improve it over time.

Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI)

Capability Maturity Model Integration was developed over the last 15 years as a successor to the original Capability Maturity Model, which was developed to improve the usability of maturity models by integrating them into one framework.

• Process improvement training and appraisal

• Developed at Carnegie Mellon University

CMMI was originally applied to software development and was sponsored by the US government, but quickly became a way for analysts and organizations to evaluate the maturity of service management and service management processes.

CMMI consists of 5 maturity levels:Initial, Managed, Defined, Quantitatively Managed, Optimizing

These levels are well-defined and can be applied to an organization’s service management capabilities and then can be used to drill down into individual ITSM processes.

These levels are especially useful, because they can be well defined in terms that most will understand and accept.

Capacity Management Maturity, Maslow, and you 3

Initial – processes are unpredictable, poorly controlled, and chaotic. Few organizations have processes that fall into this area.Managed – Processes are typically project related and typically reactiveDefined – Organizational level processes that are proacticeQuantitatively Managed – Processes are measured and controlledOptimizing – Focus is on process improvement

CMMI – Service Management Examples

CMMI can be used to evaluate an organization and the existence and effectiveness of processes can be used to characterize the maturity of the organization.

Capacity Management is considered to be a process at Maturity Level 3 – Defined. Capacity Management, while having both reactive and proactive focus can only be truly effective if the process is forward looking. Some other examples are shown here:

• Capacity Management – ML3

• Availability Management – ML3

• Service Continuity – ML3

• Service Delivery – ML2

• Strategic Service Management – ML3

• Measurement and Analysis – ML2


Capacity Management MaturityWhat is Maturity?

A maturity model is a set of structured levels that describe how well the behaviors, practices, and processes of an organization can reliably produce desired outcomes.

Various models exist. For the purposes of this paper, we’ll focus on the Capability Maturity Model, which consists of five levels of process maturity.

As we look at each of these levels, consider how being at each of these levels as an organization can impact the perception of you as the Capacity Manager.

At this point, I’ll admit that very few organizations that have dedicated Capacity Managers fall into the first stage or even the “lower half” of the second stage, but you’d be surprised at how many organizations, even with Capacity Managers, are not as mature as they could be and how that affects the perception of IT and of the Capacity Management process.

The five levels we’ll discuss are named slightly differently than the CMMI levels we’ve talked about already. We’ll call these the levels of Capacity Management Maturity:

Initial (or Chaos)Repeatable (or Reactive)Defined (or Proactive)Managed (note this is the equivalent of Quantitatively Managed in the CMMI)Optimized

Based on years of consulting experience, Metron has developed a survey that can help you self-assess your organization’s level of maturity. Very few organizations are actually at the Initial level and even fewer are at the Optimized level. Most results are between Repeatable and Defined, in our experiences.


Level 1 – Initial

• No process activity

• Regular capacity breaches and outages

• Minimal funding

• No documentation or governance

• All Capacity Management activities are reactive

• Small pockets of Capacity Management – only in technical silos

• A mixture of platform-specific tools, no Capacity Management focus

Processes are undocumented and in a state of dynamic and chaotic manner. They tend to be driven in an ad hoc, uncontrolled, and reactive manner. Processes at this level tend to be unstable.

Organizations at Level 1 tend to not have dedicated Capacity Managers or teams dedicated to Capacity and Performance. If you ask who manages capacity in the organization, you’ll typically hear that the administrators look at that (and everything else) and that there aren’t capacity problems often because “they buy a lot of hardware and make sure problems don’t happen.”

But problems happen anyway, since throwing hardware at problems doesn’t prevent all of them.

Level 2 – Repeatable

• Some acknowledgment of Capacity Management - technical silos actively managing capacity

• No objectives set, all activities still ad hoc

• Some process definition, focus is still reactive

• Pockets of people doing some Capacity Management

• Some key metrics captured, individual data sources

• Still very component focused

Some processes are repeatable, possibly with consistent results. Discipline is unlikely to be rigorous, but where it exists it may help to ensure existing processes are maintained during stressful periods.

There are organizations at this level that have Capacity Managers. These tend to be those organizations who have one person managing thousands of hardware components, usually with inadequate tools, data, and information. Capacity Managers in these organizations are frequently thought of as firefighters and are as likely to be thought of as ineffective as effective, depending on the current day’s crisis.


Level 3 – Defined

• Capacity Management exists but communication interfaces are undefined

• Objectives set and basic capacity plans produced

• Processes are defined and documented

• Key deliverables are being produced – usually manually

• Roles and responsibilities are defined

• Component level data is being captured and stored centrally

• Reports are being generated automatically

• Component Capacity Management being done well – organization at a minimum is looking at Service Capacity Management

Sets of defined and documented standard processes are established and subject to some degree of improvement over time.

Organizations that have reached this level are doing a pretty good job of Capacity Management from a technical perspective.

However, in today’s age of cost-cutting, I’d argue that this isn’t enough to guarantee that you’ll be considered vital to the future success of the business. I’ve seen entire Capacity Management groups dissolved only for the organization to realize a year later how crucial they are. That’s too late for you, the Capacity Manager.

The key point above to consider is the first one – Capacity Management has to actively consider and make an effort to put in place communication interfaces with various processes and teams:

• Administrators

• Storage

• Business analysts

• IT management

• Business management

• Other ITSM processes (Incident, Problem, Change, SLM, etc.)

Level 4 – Managed

• Capacity Management has been fully implemented and integrated with the business and IT

• Business objectives are defined (and being met)

• The process is proactively focused

• Process, activities, and communication interfaces are now documented


• IT is using defined Capacity Management processes and activities

• Capacity Management spans all IT with champions ensuring benefits are understood and being realized

• Component and service level tools being used

• Data stored in a CMIS

• Service Capacity Management has been implemented and is actively used

Using process metrics, management can effectively control processes and identify ways to adjust and adapt the process to particular projects without losses of quality.

Ideally, this is a great goal for an organization and the Capacity Manager. Having a fully implemented Capacity Management process with a proactive focus with communication interfaces defined and actively used means the Capacity Manager and the team/process is considered a vital part of IT and the business.

Level 5 – Optimized

• Capacity Management now embedded in the business and culture

• Awareness of Capacity Management company-wide

• All Capacity Management objectives aligned with the business objectives

• Key capacity metrics included in all SLAs with all reactive/proactive elements understood

• An experienced and well-trained group supports the Capacity Management process, including a process owner, manager, and capacity champions

• All communications / interfaces are defined with relevant information automatically exchanged

• A strategic solution has been implemented – includes component, service, and business data

• Data captured is being analyzed and correlated using a CMIS

The focus is on continual improvement through both incremental and innovative changes / improvements.

Few organizations actually reach this level of maturity, but there are a few things here that the individual Capacity Manager can strive to implement.

The two key things here, in my opinion, are company-wide awareness of Capacity Management as well as the automatic exchange of information between teams, people, processes, and between IT and the business.

If Capacity Management is providing value to the rest of the business automatically, then that frees the Capacity Manager to provide even more value to the business in other areas, such as finding new interfaces / avenues to provide information or even improving the level of knowledge about specific IT services or the technologies that underpin those services.


Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a theory of psychology proposed by Abraham Maslow in 1943.

Maslow broke different human needs into 5 levels and represented them graphically on a pyramid.

The most basic needs are the physiological - requirements for human survival. These include air, water, food, clothing, and shelter.

Moving up the pyramid, we reach the safety needs. These can include both physical and emotional security needs such as personal security, financial security, health and well-being, and a safety net against accidents and illnesses.

Once these needs are met, the third level of human needs is interpersonal and involves feelings of belongingness. This can include friendship, intimacy, and family.

Esteem – all humans have a need to feel respected and this includes the need to have self-esteem and self-respect.

Self-actualization – the need to be “all one can be” in whatever area is important to the person. Maslow argued that in order to understand this level of need, all other levels must be mastered.

While one could wonder how this relates to Capacity Management, we’ll see there’s an interesting parallel as we dive into how Maslow and CMMI relate.


Capacity Management Maturity vs. Maslow

Initial/ Maslow – Physiological

An organization can’t even think about being reactive if basic needs aren’t being met.No processes, chaotic. No capturing or measurement of data. No governance. No funding.Barely breathing, let alone thriving.

As I mentioned earlier, few organizations are in this category.

However, it is instructive to think about the Maslow equivalent – a person who doesn’t have air to breathe, water to drink, or food to eat isn’t going to worry much about the higher level needs. Likewise, organizations who live ‘day to day’ in a chaotic fashion likely don’t have the time, money, or people to build a Capacity Management process.

It’s also obvious in both models that getting to the next stage means that this lowest, most basic stage needs to be addressed and met first.

Repeatable/ Maslow – Safety

Many people have homes, have enough to eat, have all basic needs met, but little more.Many organizations have project level, reactive processes in place, but nothing proactive or organization-level.


A lot of organizations that think they’re doing an OK job with Capacity Management still look more at individual projects and aren’t being strategic on an organizational level.

Note that within the CMMI, Capacity Management is considered a Management Level 3 process – one could easily argue that if there isn’t a proactive aspect of Capacity Management, you really aren’t doing Capacity Management.

But without mastery of the Repeatable tasks (like capturing and storing data), you’ll never reach the Defined level.Many organizations fall into this level. Not completely chaotic, but very reactive.

Defined/ Maslow – Love/Belonging

For a Capacity Management process to be effective, it has to be proactive, has to be organizational in nature, and has to really “fit in” with an IT organization and with the business.I see a real similarity between CMMI and Maslow here – a person wants to belong to a family unit, to a community – the same manner as a Capacity Management team wants to feel like it belongs to an organization.

Having worked in a dysfunctional organization where the Capacity Managers were to be avoided (for fear that IT wouldn’t get to buy the hardware it really wanted to buy, even though unnecessary), I quickly learned that this type of belonging or fitting in within an organization is quite important to the success of the process.


Managed/ Maslow – Esteem

Once again, I find concepts within Maslow that I can easily apply to a Capacity Management process that help in the evaluation.

Successful Capacity Managers feel valued in an organization. They have a healthy amount of self-esteem and are made to feel valued by their managers and senior executives.

From the CMM perspective – a good process is one that can be quantitatively measured and managed. The process can be evaluated in such a way that one can measure improvement or measure a process that’s no longer working the way it used to.

Optimized/ Maslow – Self-Actualization

In reality, I’ve not come across a Capacity Management process that was truly optimized. One that’s truly optimized is one that is completely implemented, managed quantitatively, and the sole focus at this point is on continual process improvement.

The biggest danger I’ve found are the organizations who THINK they are at this level, but really aren’t.

Likewise, self-actualization is incredibly hard to achieve in Maslow’s hierarchy – it requires that all the other needs, including esteem, are met and in my experience this is a goal for many people – and most of them know that they probably aren’t going to actually, completely achieve it.


So the takeaway? It’s perfectly fine to have an organizational goal where Capacity Management reaches the top level. It’s also OK if the organization doesn’t achieve that goal and recognizes that’s perfectly fine.

Moving up the scales

When evaluating your Capacity Management Maturity, it’s useful to consider both the CMM/CMMI scale and Maslow and the concepts Maslow brings to his Hierarchy of Needs.

• CMM – can’t be proactive until all “reactive components” are in place, etc.

• Maslow – can’t look to fulfill higher level needs until the lower level ones are completely satisfied

• Combine the two: Design the process one level at a time and complete a GAP Analysis to determine how you can “complete” each level – and then move to the next one

When trying to move from one level to the next – it’s important to make sure that you’ve completely satisfied the requirements of that level before moving on.

For example – you would like to move to the Defined level, which makes the Capacity Management process more proactive. But how can you do that if you don’t satisfy everything in the lower level – having data available for all of the components that you’re working with, for example.

When starting from scratch, it’s easy to determine the items that you feel you need to create a mature process. Most organizations, however, have parts of a Capacity Management process already in place, and deciding to ignore those parts and start from scratch likely will cause your progress to slow, if not halt entirely.

Organizations are people

It’s unwise to try to ignore the needs of the people you work with when trying to implement or improve your Capacity Management process:

• Consider the effect on others and how others can affect your efforts

• Find people who will support your efforts – how can you help fulfil their needs?


Conclusion

It’s useful to evaluate processes and people using various models and/or hierarchies:

• There are similarities between process maturity models and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

• Processes ultimately are implemented (and helped/hindered by people), so it’s important to consider others’ needs and wants

• A mature Capacity Management process consists of solid processes but also an organization that supports and sees the value in the process

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