Making the Case for Quality

January 2014

New Zealand Port Company Stems

Tide of Overdue IT Tickets
by Janet Jacobsen

When employees at the Ports of Auckland experience information technology (IT) issues, they expect
At a Glance . . .
the organization’s IT department to address and resolve the problem quickly so they can resume nor-
mal work activities. If time-consuming delays ensue, especially with high-priority cases, employees
• The Ports of Auckland
aimed to reduce the might become dissatisfied since inconsistent service response times create frustration and dissatisfac-
number of IT call tickets that tion among the internal customers. To quell such concerns, the Ports of Auckland aimed to slash its
are not completed within
agreed-upon timeframes. number of overdue call tickets in half.
• To accomplish this, the
organization initiated About the Ports of Auckland
a Six Sigma project to PORTS OF
modify the ticket process. Ports of Auckland (POAL) is the port for New AUCKLAND
• By using Six Sigma Zealand’s largest city. It provides a full range of cargo-
tools, the team improved TAMAKI HERENGA WAKA
customer service, handling and logistics services near the city’s primary
communication, and business district. It handled 818,000 20-foot-equivalent container units in 2012-13, and is the country’s
prioritization.
primary exchange port for cruise ships and vehicle imports. Ports of Auckland employs more than 400
• As a result, the project
realized a 50 percent full-time staff and is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
reduction in past-due
IT tickets during a
Recognizing an Opportunity to Improve
sustained period.

In POAL’s 27-member IT department, tickets are defined as any faults, requests, or problems that come
to the department and are considered business as usual. Tickets become “overdue” when tasks are not
completed during defined timeframes, which can lead to inconsistent service and delays impacting the
wider business. At times, POAL employees received unpredictable levels of response to IT requests as
some tickets with low priority were completed before those requests with higher priority, or those with
equal priority that were opened earlier. The following is a list of other common ticket requests, fol-
lowed by the expected timeframe for completion:

• Request for new user setup, new computer (one-week timeframe)

• Existing computer needs replacing, application fault (one-day timeframe)
• Data not coming through from tide or wind gauges, laptop not working (one-hour timeframe
by default)
• Failure to turn on, straddle MDT (terminal) not working (one-hour timeframe)

ASQ www.asq.org Page 1 of 5

 Recognizing improvement opportunities in this data, the orga- Defining the Project
nization chartered a Six Sigma improvement team in June 2013
that was tasked with two deliverables: create a list of prioritized Once the Six Sigma training was complete, the team set to
opportunities for improvement and revise the call ticketing work quickly on the define stage of the project and created
process. The goal was to reduce the number of overdue tickets a supplier, inputs, process, outputs, customer (SIPOC) dia-
during a sustained period by 50 percent. gram to chart the current call ticket process, which can be
seen in Figure 1.
Establishing the Project Team
Also, Figure 2 provides a look at the value stream map of the
A group of seven employees comprised the improvement team, ticket process the team produced to serve as a baseline tool.
which utilized the Six Sigma define, measure, analyze, improve,
and control (DMAIC) framework: Another early task included a customer requirements survey
to gather data from frequent users regarding their rankings
• Paul Bainbridge, information communications technologies of the top IT service components. This survey provided the
manager, served as the project champion. following critical-to-quality priorities, listed from highest
• Nevit Golzarpour, total quality management leader, supported to lowest:
the project as the Black Belt.
• Matt Cammell, IT service desk team lead, Green Belt • Communication—notifications and status updates
nominee (Cammell has since received his GB certificate). • Temporary workarounds (faster return to operations)
• Maria Sturgeon, IT service desk senior analyst; Mahendra • Permanent solutions (slower return to operations)
Prasad, IT applications team lead; Craig Beetlestone, IT • Single point of contact for the IT incident
operations team lead; and Paul Chapman, IT development • Ease of logging a ticket for an incident or request
team lead. • Portal to view how the call is being handled by IT

Upon their selection to the team, Sturgeon, Prasad, Beetlestone, Measuring for Success
and Chapman received basic Six Sigma training to help
understand some key concepts. Cammell believes that having After completing the define stage, the team moved on to the next
Bainbridge, the ICT manager, and the individual team leaders step in the DMAIC process: measure. Cammell says that from a
driving the project was essential to the team’s success. “Without process perspective, getting the define and measure stages right
it there would have been difficulty in convincing some to was critical to the project. After identifying 14 key stakeholders,
change their approach to dealing with business-as-usual items,” the team prepared a stakeholder questionnaire to gather feedback
Cammell said. on three questions:

Figure 1 — Supplier, inputs, process, outputs, customer (SIPOC) diagram to chart the current call ticket process

S I P O C
Suppliers Inputs Process Outputs Customers
• Requester • Request (via email/ • IT ticketing process • Purchase order • Requester
• Project/RFC owner phone, etc.) • Fault repaired • Project/RFC (UC)
• IT team • Documentation • Hardware owner
• Suppliers • Ticketing systems provisioned • IT team
• External vendors/ • Customer portal • Software provisioned
contractors • Hardware • Change implemented
• Software • Progress/closure
• Alert/notification notifications
• Internal technical • Database updated
resource • Completed ticket
• External technical
resource
Request Source Work Request Deliver
logged components undertaken closure service

ASQ www.asq.org Page 2 of 5

Figure 2 — Value stream map of the ticket process

Customer contacts Customer contacts

the service desk second level team

Ticket is raised Ticket forwarded Ticket is raised Third level/

in VM service to appropriate in VM service external vendor
manager IT team manager engaged

SD resource IT team assigns Third level/

external vendor
attempts to ticket to attempts to
resolve issue team members resolve issue

IT team member
Customer given No No
Issue resolved No attempt to
ticket ref
resolve issue

Yes

Resolution Yes Issue resolved

is verified
with customer
Yes Issue resolved

Ticket closed

• Does the IT priority matrix work for you?

• When an agreed date (for completion) changes, is a Table 1 — Tangible benefit calculations for the project
call overdue?
Average cost/ Number of
• Do you prefer a telephone call or email for ticket closure? Priority Total cost*
day tickets overdue
Agreed date $50 959 $47,950
During this phase, the team reviewed the department’s ticket
Week
priority matrix (Figure 3), which enables IT staff to assign a (seven days)
$100 943 $94,300
priority to each ticket logged. By reviewing weekly reports from
Today
the ticketing software, the team gathered data on overdue ticket $250 14 $3,500
(24 hours)
requests both by volume and priority. After gathering data, the Now
$1,000 8 $8,000
team calculated the cost per day of 1,925 overdue tickets from a (one hour)
total of 4,281 during a span of 25 weeks. Table 1 illustrates the Critical
$10,000 1 $10,000
team’s findings. (30 minutes)
Total 1,925 $163,750
Exact cost values were to be validated by the accounts department. *Dollars are in New Zealand currency. One New Zealand dollar equals
approximately 0.84 U.S. dollars.
From this data, the team calculated the defects per unit and
sigma level for call tickets as shown in Figure 4.
• Annual change freeze
• Microsoft AX project delivery rush, implement a major
Analyzing the Data
version upgrade
After reviewing potential variation sources and causes, team • Initial Six Sigma notification
members pinpointed four main variation sources, including: • Notification correction

ASQ www.asq.org Page 3 of 5

Figure 3 — Previous Ports of Auckland ticket priority matrix

Impact
Annoyance/
Major impact Cannot work Productivity drag
deferral
Immediate Critical Now Today This week
Soon Now Today This week Defer
Urgency
Can wait Today This week Defer Defer
No urgency This week Defer Defer Defer

the ticket lifespan, correcting unsatisfactory behaviors around

Figure 4 — Defects per unit and sigma level for call tickets updates and closures, and ensuring that prioritization rules
are followed. The goal was to complete this work by the end
DPMO =
Defects per Unit
x 1,000,000 of October 2013. To measure the team’s success, a 50 percent
Opportunities per call reduction (the goal) would mean moving from an average of
0.4497 77 overdue tickets per week to less than 39 overdue tickets.
DPMO = x 1,000,000
5
DPMO = 89,940 σ = 2.84
Focusing on Improvement
Request
logged/info
Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Request To identify the best solutions, the Six Sigma team used brain-
resolved resolved resolved closure storming and ordering activities to pinpoint the highest-impact
gathered
opportunities. Next, they focused on selecting the easiest and
Defects week 1–25 = 1,925 / 4,281 = 0.4497 lowest-cost options and then formulated solutions around these
Yield = 1 – 0.4497 = 0.5503
options. Six potential solutions were discussed, and of that group,
Tier 1: Issues resolved by service desk, if not pass on to Tier 2 the following were selected:
Tier 2: Issues resolved by applications team, operations team, and development and
integration team, if not pass on to Tier 3
• Revise the priority matrix to incorporate clearer wording
Tier 3: Issues resolved by external vendors and partners (contractors onsite or offsite)
regarding impact and urgency levels, as seen in Figure 5.
Then for each of these sources, up to three potential causes Add timeframes to simplify response expectations.
were noted. Next, the team worked to verify causes primarily • Focus the IT group ticket process improvement on six
by reviewing historical data on previous tickets. Quality tools points (communication, updates, priority, ticket creation,
used during this work included brainstorming, 5 Whys analysis, ownership, and alerts) to address more than 90 percent of
and multivoting. overdue causes.
• Refine the ticket process to improve communication by
At this point, the improvement team decided to alter the ticket ensuring that requesters are kept up to date during the ticket
process and circulate their revision to the IT staff. The changes lifespan. Match the closure method (phone call or email) to
would focus on improving communication during all aspects of the customer’s preference.

Figure 5 — Revised priority matrix

Impact
Priority Matrix
Major incident Cannot work Productivity degraded Low
Critical Now Today This week
Critical
(30 minutes) (1 hour) (24 hours) (7 days)
Now Today This week
High Agreed date
(1 hour) (24 hours) (7 days)
Urgency
Today This week
Medium Agreed date Agreed date
(24 hours) (7 days)
This week
Low Agreed date Agreed date Agreed date
(7 days)

ASQ www.asq.org Page 4 of 5

• Implement a live automated ticket report and publish it live.
Make this live reporting available to the entire IT department Figure 6 — I Chart of overdue tickets weeks 31 – 39
as well as the Executive Team, which includes the chief
executive officer and several senior managers. UCL=26.20

Overdue ticket value

25
20
Overcoming Resistance x–=16.25
15
10
The keys to promoting the solutions included a top-down
5 LCL=6.25
approach to set expectations from management, individual IT
31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39
team leaders championing the solutions within their teams, and Weeks
regular communication among employees to maintain momen- Weeks =9
tum and visibility. Tickets total = 1,530
Tickets overdue = 146
Cammell said the team encountered some obstacles during the Mean = 16
project, particularly overcoming habitual behavior indifference
as evidenced by employees who sometimes avoided business-as-
improvement of the process and the value of having managers
usual work in favor of more “interesting” work. He said having
(Paul Bainbridge in this case) driving change in the company.
the leads from the various IT teams involved in the process and
The team has also received a substantial number of responses
driving the change in their respective teams ensured good buy-in
through its customer survey since launching it (survey invitations
at a local level.
sent when tickets are closed), and have used this as a live bench-
Some team members were not always focused on prioritization, mark to rate the team’s performance and customer satisfaction
therefore clarifying and ensuring everyone had a good under- across the business.
standing of what was important to the success of the project,
Cammell also believes that perseverance was also a key
Cammell said. “We made use of Minitab to provide our charting
ingredient as team members continually drove the message
and graphical analysis,” he said. “Being able to provide upper
through communications and status updates to keep the project
and lower control limit information made it helpful for those on
in focus for everyone. “Once people understood the initiative
the team not commonly working with statistical analysis to get a
wasn’t a short-term thing and it was going to stick around,”
better picture of what was actually happening in the process.”
Cammell said, “they became more engaged and interested in
achieving the goal.”
Controlling Solutions to Reduce Overdue Tickets

The number of overdue tickets dropped dramatically from an For More Information
average of 77 per week to an average of 16 once the solutions
• To learn more about the Ports of Auckland, visit the
were implemented, as seen in Figure 6. This lowered projected
company’s website at www.POAL.co.nz.
costs by more than $150,000, and process sigma improved from
• If you have specific questions about this improvement
2.84 to 3.57.
project, email Nevit Golzarpour at GolzarpourN@POAL.
Maintaining the newly improved processes was integral to the co.nz.
long-term success of this project, therefore the team created • For additional resources related to Six Sigma, visit ASQ at
automated systems for both monitoring and reporting data on IT asq.org/six-sigma.
ticket requests. Live monitoring is now available for the entire • To view more examples of successful improvement projects
IT team and weekly reports are circulated to track progress. In in quality, visit the ASQ case studies landing page at asq.org/
addition, regular project team meetings are held to maintain knowledge-center/case-studies.
momentum and visibility.
About the Author
Stakeholder feedback, including from the members of the
Executive Team, has been positive in the months following Janet Jacobsen is a freelance writer specializing in quality and
the project. Cammell delivered a presentation to the Executive compliance topics. A graduate of Drake University, she resides
Team where CEO Tony Gibson commented on the visible in Cedar Rapids, IA.

ASQ www.asq.org Page 5 of 5