Measuring and Applying Service Request Effort Data in Application Management Services

In Application Management Services (AMS), high resource utilization, 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 utilization, assessing workload and assigning service requests. In this paper, we present a two-step approach to help achieve the above objectives. We first measure the actual amount of effort that each resource 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 utilization and assess SR assignment process based on the effort data calculated in step one.