Title: Estimating and applying service request effort data in application management services

Authors: Ying Li; Ta-Hsin Li; Kaan Katircioglu

Addresses: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, 1101 Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights, 10598, USA ' IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, 1101 Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights, 10598, USA ' IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, 1101 Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights, 10598, USA

Abstract: In application management services (AMS), high resource utilisation, effective resource planning and optimal assignment of service requests to resources are critical to success. Meeting these objectives requires a systematic and repeatable approach for determining the best way of measuring resource utilisation, assessing workload and assigning service requests. In this paper, we present a two-step approach to help achieve the above objectives. We first estimate the amount of effort that each resource likely spends on handling each service request (SR) based on a metadata model and a set of SR handling priority rules. Then, we proceed to measure resource utilisation and assess SR assignment process based on such effort data. Furthermore, we propose a maximum likelihood method to estimate the mean effort for a class of tickets based on some statistical assumptions. A simulation study has been conducted to validate its feasibility.

Keywords: application management services; AMS; resource utilisation; resource planning; service requests; service request assignment; service request effort estimation; simulation; metadata modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPIM.2014.060603

International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2014 Vol.7 No.1, pp.22 - 33

Published online: 31 Jul 2014 *

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