Planning the sizing of the first-line support (1 of 5)

In this series of articles, we will examine the question of how to plan correctly the sizing of first-line support that responds to incidents and requests. This will enable us to adjust staffing costs for service provision while also guaranteeing compliance with the agreed service levels.

The Capacity Management process ensures that there are sufficient resources to provide services in alignment with Service Level Management and Financial Management.

People with technical training (and I include myself in that) tend to think that resources consist only of servers, hard discs, broadband and other technical matters. Sin embargo, In spite of this, the concept of resources in the context of Capacity Management includes both technical resources and human resources.

In this series of articles, we will study how to plan the sizing of first-line support in order to have sufficient technicians available to meet the demand.

This article will make use of simple mathematical fundamentals based on statistics and queuing theory. The aim is not to understand the mathematical basis, but only to know how to apply it. Therefore, I will give you references that will help you understand the theoretical basis in more depth, without going into more detail.

If you would like to review basic concepts of statistics, then I recommend the book "Probability and Statistics Applied to Engineering" while for topics on queuing theory, I recommend the book, “Introduction to Simulation and Queuing Theory”. On queuing theory, you will find interesting information in the article “An Introduction to Queuing Theory Applied to Service Management”.

Don’t be intimidated by the mathematical concepts that we will use in this series of articles, we will focus on their use and not on proving that they are correct.. Moreover, they are simpler than it might seem at first.

The method that we describe will only be applicable if:

1. You manage a high volume of incidents/requests.
2. The incidents/requests are classified correctly and are handled by technicians who are adequate according to this classification.
3. The periods for response to incidents/requests are regular within each classification.
4. The period for response to an incident/request follows an exponential distribution.
5. The incidents/requests are reported to first-line support in accordance with an exponential distribution.

In the following article, we will explain precisely what the five previous points mean.

José Luis Fernández Piñero