The objective of this activity is to develop, maintain, test and revise alternative approaches in satisfying various enterprise-shared resource requirements. It delivers the capacity plan that addresses the customer's resource requirements. This plan is configurable, meets performance expectations, and has the required commitment to implement.

The inputs to this activity are forecast assumptions, forecast projections, and subject matter expert recommendations. The controls for this activity are financial constraints, hardware constraints, performance policies, resource standards and definitions, and strategy and direction. The deliverables from this activity are the agreed capacity plan, alternative solutions, and an optimized resource solution.

The Capacity Plan will detail existing usage of critical IT resources under management. Typically, for servers this involves reporting and trend analysis for CPU, I/O, memory, storage, and the network interfaces. The Capacity Plan can also include correlation of IT resource usage to IT applications (services) and business usage patterns. Similarly, planned business activity and IT application changes and deployments might be factored into forecasts for IT resource requirements.