Capacity Planning - 1

 

Capacity planning - Introduction

There is a story of a King who played a chess with a commoner. Great game played and commoner won the game. King also very happy because he used great tactics for the first time. After losing the game King asked to commoner, “what do you want?” Commoner mentioned he just needed double the food grains for each chess square, i.e., if 1^st square has 1 seed, 2^nd square 2 seeds, 3^rd will be 4, 4^th will be 8 seeds., it will end at 64^th square, King in the joy he agreed to this.

He didn’t know about the exponential growth. He lost all the grains in kingdom to the commoner.

What exactly happened here is King didn’t forecasted or calculated the risk of giving away the grains. He doesn’t know how much resource he has and how much he is going to give away.

Capacity planning in mythological age

In Mahabharatha, Krishna great strategist used his resource planning strategically to beat Kauravas. In Ramayana, war against Ravana is not a simple thing for the person who is in exile. He gathered other Kingdoms, small resources to build the bridge to Lanka, saving his brother from Indrajith’s weapon etc., Smart way of handling things when every chip gone down.

Capacity planning in medieval age

Agriculture, where resource planning was effectively used, like crop rotation to retain the earth’s fertility and weather protection etc., Using cattle to manage their non-hay days.

Capacity planning in Industrial age

Capacity planning industrial age used for mass production for labor machinery and raw material. Supply chain management, to ensure flow of resources. Demand forecasting, historical data, market trends and economical indicators to forecast the future demand

Project Evaluation Review Technique

Initially US Navy used this as Program Evaluation Review Technique to optimize the tasks of Fabrication, Production, Component Testing etc.,

 

Three point estimate is used in US Navy, each event like Design and Testing are two events. D à T, à (Arrow represents the time duration). 

So the estimations are Most likely, Optimistic Time and Pessimistic Time.

If everything fine with everyone, goes smooth it can be optimistic, Most likely, any given scenario how much time it will take in realistically. Pessimistic, what if sudden resignation, non-availability of resources happen, so the calculation takes is pessimistic way may be negative but accepting reality and approaching it in providing more contingency here we selects Pessimistic.

In a time distributed curve you can able to see the probability is more with the Most Likely. Also it is very near to the expected time to complete.