In small business, we often forget to plan as we are too busy with the day-to-day activities involved in delivering our product or service. I’m a big fan of planning in business, because if you’re going to run a business that grows beyond the micro level, it will involve many people over time. To keep people working effectively, there needs to be a degree of planning.
Planning for your business should be reflected in an IT plan to ensure your costs are anticipated and budgeted. Rapid growth is good, but when it’s impeded by underperforming or under-specified IT solutions, it can be very costly to your productivity or quality of delivery. Fancy losing clients because your business could not add the staff fast enough to deliver a quality product or service.
Areas that you should cover in your IT capacity planning include:
- Server storage space (hard drives to store data)
- Licensing (many programs lock out additional staff when limits are reached)
- Server speed (many factors can effect server performance)
- Hard Drive Speeds
- Number and speed of processors
- Memory (RAM) capacity and speed
- Number of users being supported
- Number of applications per server
- Quality of server equipment (age, transfer speeds etc)
- Tuning of applications and operating system
- Number of PCs or terminals available
- Internet bandwidth for accessing web-based or external office based information or applications
- Quality of internal and private networks
- Capacity of backup systems to protect all data and systems information
- Power to run and cool the systems
- Cooling capacity
- Physical space in the server room
Often these simple planning aspects are overlooked. Take, for example, a real estate agent who opens a site office on a local development project, and a branch office five kilometers down the road. He has a combination of web-based tools and in-house server-based systems that his 35 staff already use. Now, he has three PCs required in the site office, and they need to be laptops so that they can be taken off site each night, as security is a concern. He also needs five attractive PCs for the branch office, which is a modern showroom environment to bring people in off the street to browse properties on clean, new screens.
The head office internet connection is okay for the current use of web-based applications, but will not support all the remote staff accessing the server-based applications. It also won’t support the IP-based phone calls between the offices. The servers in the office also need additional licenses, and possibly an upgrade to one of the servers is in order. All of this could have been planned as part of opening new offices, but instead has been left until staff in the new locations are disgruntled and feel like second-class citizens.
Do people who feel like second-class citizens make the best representatives for your company?
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David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.
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