Project Overview

Software services have been one of the major contributors of outsourcing, sub-contracting and high
target for managed services. Majority of the business organizations have started outsourcing the entire
functional desk services and infrastructure to hosting companies such as IBM, Oracle, AWS etc.

This model of business has proved to work better due to the specialization the service providers
possesses and the economic benefits realized by the business organizations. Due to the economies of
scale, the service providers can offer infrastructure hosting and management and support of the
applications to multiple customers. The IT service management has helped service providers to promise
faster and better services.

The customer is guaranteed the level of service by the provider, and various aspects of delivery is closely
monitored and corrected. One such deliverable is the resolution of incidents within the service levels
(SLA) agreed between the provider and customer. The incidents are classified as :

 Critical: Disruption of system & services, where the business operation and financial impact is
very huge. Business is not able to carry out any activities due to this incident
 High: Disruption of system & services, where some of the critical business activities are not
available; Normal business is possible, but the critical activities are causing several sections of
the business to be non-functional; No workaround is possible.
 Medium:Disruption of system & services, where the incident has potential to impact the system
if its not addressed at the earliest
 Low: The impact is very localized; Minor functionality is impacting a single or very few users, and
the issue has to be fixed, but is not urgent

Confidentiality:

At the outset, our group understands that the data is competitive advantage to organizations and we
respect that. We are thankful to the data provider (Oracle) for sharing this sample data for the year. We
request the readers of this report to use this data only for academic purpose.

Data Source

In this project, we will analyze the 2017 data for the incidents from one of the Retail customer’s mission
critical application; We will demonstrate various concepts learned during the Quantitative techniques
course.

Service Level Agreements with customer is a contractual and legal obligation, that needs to be met and
revised. When an incident is detected or reported, the service providers has to acknowledge within a
“Response Time” and also depending on the severity of the incident needs to resolve the issues within a
“Resolution Time”, and both of which are agreed and enforced by the vendor. SLAs are given below:

Critical : 90% of incidents are resolved within 4 High : 90% of incidents are resolved within 8
hours; Hours:

Medium : 24 business hours Low : 168 business hours

Problem Statement

While the data can be classified for all the various categories, resolution times for High tickets are the
focus of discussion. All the analysis will be performed on the High ticket as the resolution times are
higher than SLA; The Mean and Standard Deviations are known from the population for the analysis.

Probability of critical incident count > 3 could be determined.

Descriptive Analysis
Critical High Medium Low

Mean 4.6 Mean 11.1 Mean 135.5 Mean 187.9

Standard Error 1.0 Standard Error 2.1 Standard Error 3.3 Standard Error 9.7
Median 5 Median 5 Median 100.0 Median 119.0
Mode 5 Mode 3 Mode 3.0 Mode 21.0
Standard Deviation 2.3 Standard Deviation 15.7 Standard Deviation 135.1 Standard Deviation 210.7
Sample Variance 5.3 Sample Variance 246.7 Sample Variance 18264.5 Sample Variance 44400.1
Kurtosis 0.3 Kurtosis 6.0 Kurtosis 5.9 Kurtosis 5.4
Skewness 0.6 Skewness 2.5 Skewness 2.1 Skewness 2.0
Range 6 Range 65 Range 1163.0 Range 1506.0
Minimum 2 Minimum 1 Minimum 2 Minimum 1.0
Maximum 8 Maximum 66 Maximum 1165 Maximum 1507.0
Sum 23 Sum 609 Sum 225005 Sum 89234.0
Count 5 Count 55 Count 1660 Count 475.0

Critical Ticket Resolution: The SLA is 4 hours and
most of the tickets were resolved within SLA. The
population mean (U) is close to 4hours. The SD of
2.3 The data is moderately skewed (0.6). The
Kurtosis also tells that the data is mostly
symmetrical;
High Ticket Resolution: The SLA is 8 hours and
more than half of the tickets are resolved within
that time and the mode is 3 hours. The skewness
of 2.5 indicates that the data is highly skewed of
all the categories. The positive value tell us that it
is skewed to right.
Medium Ticket Resolution: The SLA is 96 hours
and most of the tickets are resolved within SLA.
With the SD of 135, the data is skewed to right,
but not as much as High ticket, and is still highly
skewed.
Low Ticket Resolution: The SLA is 168 hours and
most of the tickets are resolved within SLA. With
the SD of over 200, the data is skewed to right,
but not as much as High ticket, and is still highly
skewed.
Histograms
The histogram shows that majority of the tickets
fall into the < 5 hours
The Histogram clearly shows over 70% of the
tickets meet the SLA based on the data
Critical: Although the data is spread for critical
tickets, the Box and whisker shows that the data
set is skewed to the right; The resolution times for
Critical incidents don’t have any outlier, and are
very closely spread. The range is 6 hours and all
the response times are concentrated in the 2
The histogram for High tickets show that 0-10
hours bucket has majority of the ticket resolved.
Most of the low tickets are closed and the
remaining tickets were to be seen as delay in
getting the confirmation.
Medium: The SLA for this is 96 hours and around
50% of the data is within the SLA. The data of the
other 50 percent is skewed to the right with many
datapoints over the 1.5 IQR.
quartiles.
High: More than 50% of the data is beyond the
median and the whisker to the right is longer. This
needs to be investigated. The data is again left
skewed as the concentration of the response
times are to the left and closer to 8 hours SLA.
There are about 12 data points that are outside of
1.5*IQR
Low: The box and whisker plot for the Low priority
tickets are skewed to right. The middle 50% of the
data points are spread across 232 hours; There
are outliers on the right, and outliers on the left
side is none.

Hypothesis Testing
Company wants to test hypothesis for High tickets resolved in less than 8 hrs.
The following assumptions are made:
Sample size is 55
. Population Std Dev is 15.7
Level of significance is assumed to be 0.05
Hence CLT applies.
Constructing the hypotheses
Ho: U>8hrs is the null hypothesis
Ha: U<8hrs is the alternate hypothesis
Determining the test statistic
z = (u - U)/(s/sqrt(n)
z=(11.1-8)/(15.7/sqrt(55))
z = 1.47
Critical region for the level of significance
zc =z.05
Since this is a left tailed test, zc = -1.645
P value
P (z<1.47) = 0.9292
P critical =0.05
0.9292 >0.05 implies the test is insignificant
Conclusion: From the above analysis, it is evident that the null hypothesis cannot be rejected as it is well
supported, i.e. high tickets resolution time will be more than 8 hours.