Reducing defects in IT service delivery

In IT Service Delivery organizations, Quality Analysts (QAs) are responsible for analyzing sets of service tickets to detect exceptional trends, launch investigations and identify and remove defects in the IT environment, thereby bringing down the volume of incidents over time. The large scale of operation (thousands of tickets), hard to detect temporal variations, mix of structured and unstructured data and lack of suitable tool support make the QA's job very time-consuming and challenging. Based on extensive interactions with QAs and field study, we have developed a tool named Drishti that combines a novel and highly interactive user interface, with advanced text processing and statistical analysis support to drastically reduce the time needed to carry out quality analysis, and improve the outcome. The tool has been deployed widely in IBM's global delivery centers and significant benefits have been realized in terms of productivity improvement of QAs as well as the number of investigations that could be triggered to reduce defects.