Estimating and applying service request effort data in application management services

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. © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.