Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Planner

🎯 Role Definition

The IT Planner is responsible for translating business demand into executable IT capacity plans, maintaining an optimized and cost-effective infrastructure roadmap, coordinating release and maintenance windows, and ensuring timely, compliant delivery of IT services. This role liaises across engineering, operations, procurement, finance and business stakeholders to forecast demand, manage IT portfolio constraints, optimize resource allocation and drive continuous improvement in capacity, performance and cost efficiency.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

IT Analyst / Operations Analyst
Capacity Planner / Resource Planner
Infrastructure Engineer / Systems Engineer

Advancement To:

IT Portfolio Manager
IT Program Manager / Technical Program Manager
Head of IT Planning / Director of IT Operations

Lateral Moves:

Release Manager
Service Delivery Manager
IT Financial Analyst (FinOps)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Develop, maintain and continuously refine short-, medium- and long-term IT capacity plans (compute, storage, networking, database and application tiers) aligned to business demand forecasts, service level agreements (SLAs) and growth scenarios, using historical utilization data, trend analysis and predictive modelling.
Lead cross-functional capacity and resource planning cycles with infrastructure, cloud engineering, applications, security and finance teams to balance performance, availability and cost across on‑premise and public cloud environments.
Create and maintain an IT infrastructure roadmap that captures migrations, refreshes, decommissions, and consolidation opportunities; prioritize initiatives by risk, cost, and business impact to inform investment and procurement decisions.
Build and present monthly/quarterly capacity and cost reports (including utilization, headroom, projected spend and KPI variance) to IT leadership and finance partners; translate technical metrics into business-focused insights and actionable recommendations.
Develop scenario-based forecasting models and “what-if” analyses to evaluate the impact of new projects, product launches, M&A activity, or seasonal demand changes on infrastructure capacity and budgets.
Manage IT release and maintenance window calendars across teams, coordinating cutover plans, risk mitigation, resource assignments and rollback procedures to minimize service disruption and meet change advisory board (CAB) requirements.
Own cloud cost governance efforts: implement tagging strategies, monitor cost allocation, identify waste, recommend rightsizing, reserved instance/commitment strategies, and lead FinOps optimization initiatives.
Define and enforce capacity management policies, thresholds, escalation procedures and automated alerts in monitoring and CMDB tools to proactively prevent capacity-related incidents and SLA breaches.
Collaborate with procurement and vendor management to plan hardware refresh cycles, negotiate support and warranty timelines, and align vendor delivery schedules with capacity needs and contracts.
Maintain a robust Configuration Management Database (CMDB) or asset inventory reconciliation process to ensure accurate mapping of services, dependencies and capacity drivers for informed planning decisions.
Lead cost-benefit and ROI analyses for infrastructure investments, cloud migrations, or platform upgrades; prepare business cases, total cost of ownership (TCO) estimates and lifecycle cost models for stakeholders.
Coordinate resource allocation for major programs and project portfolios, ensuring the right skill sets, headcount and external contractors are scheduled against project milestones, avoiding overcommitment and resource conflicts.
Support disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity planning with capacity requirements, RTO/RPO analyses and failover capacity sizing to ensure recoverability and resilience targets are achievable.
Conduct capacity and performance reviews post-implementation to validate assumed usage patterns, document lessons learned, refine forecasting models and adjust future planning assumptions.
Implement automation and tooling to ingest telemetry (monitoring metrics, logs, billing data) and generate near-real-time capacity dashboards and alerts to improve planning cadence and accuracy.
Champion license and software asset management (SAM) planning for infrastructure components and enterprise applications; forecast license needs and identify opportunities for consolidation or re‑negotiation.
Provide technical governance for new service onboarding, ensuring architecture review, capacity sizing, dependency mapping and runbook creation happen prior to production launch.
Facilitate cross-functional working sessions with engineering, security and product teams to translate product roadmaps into capacity requirements and delivery timelines.
Maintain and improve capacity planning methodologies, incorporating best practices (ITIL Capacity Management), predictive analytics and machine learning models where appropriate.
Track and manage risk registers related to capacity constraints, supply chain lead times (hardware), vendor outages and single points of failure; recommend mitigations and contingency plans.
Define and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) such as utilization rates, available headroom, forecast accuracy, mean time to scale and cost per workload to drive continuous improvement.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc capacity and utilization data requests and provide exploratory analysis for project teams and business stakeholders.
Contribute to the broader IT strategy and roadmap discussions by providing capacity, cost and resource impact assessments for proposed initiatives.
Collaborate with PMO and project managers to align resource schedules, identify critical path constraints and update timelines when capacity issues arise.
Participate in change advisory board (CAB) reviews and risk assessments for capacity-sensitive changes and major releases.
Create and maintain runbooks, standard operating procedures and knowledge articles related to capacity planning, scaling operations and recovery procedures.
Provide mentoring and guidance to junior planners and analysts on capacity modelling, forecasting techniques and tooling best practices.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Capacity planning and demand forecasting (compute, storage, network, database) using historical telemetry and trend analysis.
Strong experience with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, CloudWatch) to derive capacity metrics and alerts.
Proficient in cloud cost management and FinOps practices for AWS, Azure and/or GCP (tagging, cost allocation, rightsizing, savings plans).
Familiarity with ITSM and CMDB tools such as ServiceNow, BMC Remedy and accurate asset/configuration mapping.
Advanced MS Excel modeling (pivot tables, macros), plus experience with data visualization tools (Power BI, Tableau) for reporting.
Scheduling and project planning tools (MS Project, Primavera P6, Jira Portfolio/Advanced Roadmaps) for release and resource planning.
Knowledge of ITIL Capacity Management processes and service lifecycle concepts.
Experience with automation and scripting for data ingestion and reporting (Python, PowerShell, SQL).
Financial planning and budgeting skills: TCO, ROI, OPEX vs CAPEX modeling, cost allocation methodologies.
Understanding of infrastructure architectures (virtualization, containers, storage arrays, SAN/NAS, networking) and workload placement considerations.
Familiarity with disaster recovery, business continuity planning and sizing for RTO/RPO objectives.
Software asset and license management (SAM) knowledge and experience forecasting license renewals and consolidation opportunities.

Soft Skills

Strong stakeholder management and the ability to translate technical capacity constraints into business risk and cost language.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills with experience presenting to executive leadership and finance partners.
Analytical mindset with attention to detail and strong quantitative problem-solving capabilities.
Proactive, outcome-oriented planner who can prioritize competing demands and influence cross-functional teams.
Collaborative team player skilled at building relationships across engineering, operations, product and finance.
Adaptable and able to operate effectively in fast-changing environments with ambiguous requirements.
Negotiation skills for vendor management, procurement timing and contract alignment.
Facilitation skills for capacity reviews, working sessions and post-implementation retrospectives.
Time management and multi-tasking capabilities to handle concurrent planning cycles and urgent requests.
Continuous improvement mindset with a passion for process optimization and automation.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business Administration or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in Information Systems, Business Administration (MBA) or a related advanced degree.
Certifications such as ITIL Foundation, Certified Capacity Planner, PMP, Certified ScrumMaster, or FinOps Practitioner are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Information Technology
Systems Engineering / Electrical Engineering
Business Administration / Finance
Data Analytics / Applied Mathematics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3–8+ years in IT planning, capacity management, infrastructure operations, cloud cost management or related roles.

Preferred:

5+ years of progressive experience in capacity/resource planning for hybrid cloud and on-premise environments, with demonstrated success in cross-functional stakeholder engagement, financial modelling and tooling implementation.