Software Capacity Planning

[taratodd]

We want to manage capacity plans in SAM Pro to:

• Improve financial forecasting accuracy
• Tie software spend to real business activity and strategic growth (more customers, more regions, etc)
• Strengthen vendor negotiations with data-driven forecasts (protect us from significant increases or decreases - - more beneficial commercial terms)

To do this, we need to track

• growth drivers (headcount, customers, transactions, workloads, etc.)
• assumptions (growth rate (e.g. employee growth 8% annually, customer growth 15% annually), utilization (e.g. only 50% of staff require access), adoption (time for implementation), evolution (upgrades/migrations))
• Maybe cost estimates (CPI increases, vendor uplift, etc)
• Maybe scenarios (low, expected, high;  what-if scenarios)
• Comments/Notes from software owners

I don't see any OOB capability for this, but don't want to customize if we don't have to. The intent is to send out to software owners every 6 months to validate/update and then both procurement and FP&A can use in planning. We already have reporting showing our annual spend that drills into software contracts and usage, but want to add the capacity plans to determine where we might go astray.