The demand management process is something that we all spend a lot of time discussing. It's not an easy thing to balance; we need to think about what are our objectives. We need to try and avoid excess capacity generating costs, which do not bring about value. This is something that we really need to get right.
In business, demand management is used to describe the proactive management of work initiatives (demand) with business constraints (supply).
Demands come in two types in ITIL:- Short-term - e.g. critical failures to IT resources
- Long-term - e.g. expensive server upgrade
Although we talk about resources and effective usage of resources constantly, this is an area where we spend far too much time with very little on return in value. During the demand management process, we look at some of these things. There are a lot of best practices scattered around but some of things we need to address are actually really basic. Things like poor service packages - an underlying package that has a service level package on top of it. It's this kind of stack and rack process but within our core packages we manage this demand. Excess grey areas need to be addressed and it's about managing the capability all the way up the chain to our specific customer and their needs.
We break it out into individual component types so we can see a service correlation. Then we say, hey, we need access capacity for something that the business is going to do. Having a process a little rigor around this versus scaling in the wrong directions is a direct correlation to operational health.