Ensure optimal use of resources and plan for additional capacity based on upcoming business requirements and initiatives.

Overview

Enterprise automation helps companies become more efficient. However, as the automation footprint grows across the organization, the automation practice must ensure these efficiency gains are also reflected in managing and optimizing the resources required to deliver them.

Capacity planning helps organizations ensure that adequate capacity is available at any given time to meet the business demand while ensuring the optimal use of the resources. These resources could include everything required to deliver automation services to the business, such as platform licenses, skilled automation builders, third-party services used in automations such as a cloud database, etc.

The capacity planning function also needs to work closely with other levers in the GEARS framework, mainly Intake & Prioritization and Support Model.

Intake & prioritization helps provide a thorough understanding of the future business demand. For example, as a part of your periodic budgeting exercise, a backlog of automation opportunities can help you estimate the required platform capacity, such as the number of recipes or additional tasks needed to support the existing and future automations.

Similarly, the overall capacity planning also needs to ensure that automations can meet the service level agreements (SLAs) and the performance requirements of the business, such as concurrent user access, throughput, response times, etc.

In addition to ensuring adequate resource capacity to meet business needs, capacity planning also focuses on optimizing service costs by developing a suitable financial model to improve the efficiency of the automation delivery.

Typically, as the organization matures with more teams building automations, they adopt one of the following three financial models based on their automation practice design (centralized or distributed):

Cost allocation: Costs are distributed across all the teams using the automation services. The cost could be distributed evenly or weighed based on certain factors, such as the number of automation builders per team. This model gives very little control to the business teams in managing their costs.

Showback: The showback model provides visibility into the cost of delivering automations and divides the cost amongst different teams based on their consumption and future demand. This model gives business teams a better understanding of the consumption trend but doesn't charge for their usage.

Chargeback: The chargeback model is similar to the showback model, except that each team is charged based on usage. The chargeback model provides better accountability for each group and greater control to plan capacity for future demands.

Both showback and chargeback models allow organizations to drive desired behaviour across teams to improve the platform adoption. While more challenging to implement, the chargeback model goes further by helping teams become more strategic with their consumption of automation resources, leading to better overall efficiency.

Using Workato Automation HQ capabilities, organizations can allocate and manage platform usage limits, such as recipes and tasks per team. Further, teams can use efficient design techniques based on task optimization strategies to streamline their usage within the allocated capacity to deliver more automations.

Resources

GEARS Assets