Handing a Hybrid Multicriteria Model for Choosing Specialists to Analyze Application Management Service Tickets

Abstract

The operational routine in an Application Management Service (AMS) provider begins with the acknowledgment of a customer request for maintenance or support in an application. A ticket then is created to register the customer request. That ticket must be analyzed by one of the AMS specialists, for that it is necessary to identify which specialist is the most appropriated for the task. To achieve better results in choices about alternatives prioritization, it is common to apply decision support methods. Verbal Decision Analysis (VDA) is a framework that consists of a series of multicriteria methods for both classification and ordering alternatives. This paper presents a model constructed to optimize the choice of the AMS specialist to perform the analysis of an AMS ticket. It was collected information of the operational process of an AMS provided by a multinational company. An investigation was conducted to identify the criteria that influences the designation of specialists to a ticket, then a model was constructed based on the hybridization of VDA methods to prioritize the specialists, the ORCLASS method for classification and ZAPROS III-i for ordering. Two reals scenarios were considered to validate the model. The application of the ORCLASS method resulted in two groups of specialists, the preferable and the non-preferable, for the preferable group it was applied the ZAPROS III-i method, resulting in a ranked list of specialists. In the end, the results were satisfactory according to the evaluation of the professionals involved in the AMS studied, which agreed with the prioritization obtained.