Demand and Capacity Manager

Demand & Capacity Manager

Reporting to: Head of Integration, Performance and Cost Management

Location: UK or Germany

Role Objectives

The Demand & Capacity Manager ensures that Technology Operations has the resources, capacity, and performance headroom needed to deliver stable, predictable, and scalable services globally. The role is responsible for forecasting demand, analysing consumption trends, modelling capacity needs, and identifying risks related to saturation, seasonal patterns, and strategic growth. This includes coordinating with Finance, PMO, Service Performance Management, Engineering teams, and vendors to ensure that demand is understood, capacity is planned, and costs are optimised across infrastructure, platforms, cloud, and global operations.

Key Results / Areas

Core Responsibilities

• Own the global demand and capacity management framework across infrastructure, cloud, platforms, and operational delivery services.
• Develop and maintain capacity models incorporating historic trends, business forecasts, and technology growth patterns.
• Forecast demand for infrastructure resources, cloud consumption, platform usage, licensing, storage, workloads, and workforce/operational capacity.
• Identify saturation risks, constraints, seasonal spikes, and capacity-related service vulnerabilities.
• Provide capacity insights to PMO for prioritisation, investment planning, and readiness assessments.
• Work with Service Performance Manager to correlate capacity with stability, recurrence patterns, and performance bottlenecks.
• Partner with Vendor/Contract Manager to assess vendor capacity commitments, delivery models, and scalability.
• Collaborate with EA to ensure capacity plans align with technology roadmaps and transformation initiatives.
• Ensure appropriate capacity for major business events, releases, migrations, and peak periods.
• Maintain regular reporting covering consumption, forecasts, risks, and recommended actions.
• Accountable for the accuracy and quality of global demand and capacity forecasts.
• Ensure capacity risks are identified early, documented, communicated, and mitigated with clear action plans.
• Maintain a single source of truth for demand, consumption, and capacity insights.
• Provide leadership with proactive recommendations for investment, optimisation, and scaling actions.
• Drive alignment between capacity planning, financial forecasting, and platform/infrastructure strategies.
• Prepare and run capacity governance routines including monthly capacity reviews.
• Ensure readiness and capacity availability for major business or technology events.
• Support cloud optimisation and FinOps activities with accurate consumption modelling.
• Collaborate with operational teams to ensure capacity actions support service stability and avoid degradations.

Global Delivery & Collaboration

• Work with Regional Service Managers to capture local demand patterns, constraints, and capacity needs.
• Collaborate with EA to ensure strategic alignment with long-term architectural evolution.
• Partner with Infrastructure and Platform teams to understand scaling limits, performance boundaries, and capacity signals.
• Engage with PMO to validate capacity readiness for projects, migrations, and releases.
• Coordinate globally with MSPs (incl. Cognizant) to validate vendor capacity and delivery throughput.
• Work with Finance and Cost Management teams to validate budget impact, cost-to-serve models, and cloud consumption forecasts.
• Support Security and Compliance capacity requirements for logging, monitoring, DR, and backup workloads.

Key Deliverable

• Global Demand & Capacity Forecast (rolling 12–36 months).
• Capacity Models & Dashboards (infrastructure, cloud, platform, operational workload).
• Monthly Consumption & Capacity Report including risks, hotspots, and future projections.
• Quarterly Capacity Review Pack including investment proposals and optimisation insights.
• Capacity inputs for PMO readiness assessments, budgeting, and prioritisation.
• Documentation of mitigation actions for capacity-related risks.
• Cloud consumption models and cost-optimisation recommendations.

KPIs & Success Measures

• Accuracy of demand and capacity forecasts.
• Reduction of unplanned capacity-related incidents or outages.
• Timeliness of capacity reporting and insights.
• Optimisation impact (cloud savings, resource efficiency gains).
• Stakeholder satisfaction across Technology, Finance, Regions, and Vendors.
• Alignment of capacity with business demand and technology roadmaps.

Knowledge, qualifications and experience

• Hands-on experience with automation platforms (ServiceNow Flow Designer, Power Automate, Rundeck, Ansible, Terraform, or similar).
• Scripting skills (PowerShell, Python, Bash, or equivalent).
• Understanding of monitoring and alerting systems (e.g., Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, Azure Monitor).
• Knowledge of ITSM processes (Incident, Problem, Change, Request) and workflow automation.
• Experience integrating automation with CI/CD, APIs, and cloud-native services.
• Strong understanding of identity models, RBAC, and secure automation practices.
• Ability to analyse operational issues and translate them into automation solutions.
• Experience working with MSPs and global delivery models

Skills and Competencies

• Builds customer loyalty: Demonstrates an understanding of the customer (internal/external), builds productive customer relationships with integrity and takes responsibility for ensuring customer advocacy.
• Delivers against operational objectives: Translates strategic priorities into medium-term operational reality for own part of the business, respecting and aligning with the values and managing interdependencies with other parts of Hays.
• Engaging Communication: Engages and influences by using a wide range of communication methods and styles with the ability to present complex technical issues to varied populations. Facilitates understanding and encourages communication both within own team and more broadly.
• Builds collaborative relationships: Establishes effective relationships with a wide range of stakeholders inside and outside their immediate working environment, valuing the contribution from others and leveraging networks across Hays.
• Facilitates transformational change: Facilitates the implementation of change and transformation within the workplace by guiding others and helping them adapt is a positive ambassador of change.
• Identifying and developing talent: Identifies and appropriately deploys key knowledge, skills and experience required across their organisation. Uses Hays’ people processes to attract, develop and engage and retain the appropriate talent.
• Demonstrates personal resilience: Highly efficient, has the organisation skills to manage a diverse range of tasks and see work through to completion, in a timely manner, ensuring deadlines are met. Able to cope well with pressure, deals constructively with setbacks.
• Demonstrates continuous learning: Demonstrates continuous interest in personal skills in development and learning, aiming to develop senior leadership capabilities and seeking continuous feedback to manage own impact and maintain self-awareness.

Situational Requirements

• Comfortable travelling– a dispersed geographic spread of countries.
• Able to work across multiple time zones.
• Fluency in written and oral English.

At Hays, we share a passion for creating a culture of opportunities for our people to flourish and succeed, whatever your background. We know that diversity of perspective and an inclusive approach, which encourages those experiences and views to be heard, is great for business and therefore your career.