SDT Buzzer: An innovation towards process simplification and effective utilization of resources

Disclaimer:

This document doesn’t contain any confidential or proprietary information related with my current or previous employers. This document talks about one of my innovative idea “SDT Buzzer” which I implemented on my own, so that I can utilize my time more productively and can make my work more interesting.

Introduction:

During April 2005 till Aug 2006, I was working for Computer Sciences Corporation. In CSC, I was given the responsibility to provide support to manufacturing IT applications to one of their client. As part of that job responsibility, I was expected to monitor a Service Desk Ticket system for new service requests ticket after every 5 minute interval. My organization had a contract with its client of acknowledging every ticket within 10minute time window and providing a solution for severity 1 issue within 8 hours of filing a ticket. Considering there were huge financial implications of not meeting SLA, it was very important from my organization perspective to meet the SLA of acknowledging the ticket and solving the ticket.

Refreshing a web page after every 5 minute was a monotonous job for me and soon after starting this work I realized that it can be automated. I thought I can develop a tool, which can monitor new tickets for me and can inform me to acknowledge the ticket. It was important not to miss the SLA, so mandatory requirement was implement a mechanism which will force me to act on it immediately. This tool was not sending alert in the form of SMS or EMAIL. This tool was starting the buzzer on my machine and was forcing me to close that buzzer.

So I tried to solve the problem of manual monitoring by automating it. At that point of time automated monitoring was not important from organization perspective just because they had engaged more than 200 employees in this job and I was one of them. But I had a strong desire to implement it just because I wanted to spend my time on real engineering problems. So I decided to implement is after office hours and during free time.

How it was implemented?

In order to implement it, I created a Java application which was running on my machine all the time. The application was designed in such a way that it was comparing two versions of service desk ticket system web page. Two versions were two different copies of same web page one downloaded at time t1 and another downloaded at t1+ 2 minute. This application was downloading service desk ticket page using my credentials via HTTPClient java library. This web page content was HTML content. Tidy library was used to convert HTML into well-formed XHTML page, so that it can be parsed using XML parser. Tool was comparing content of a specific table. If it was finding difference between the content of two pages it was starting buzzer on the machine. Application was downloading the content after every 2 minute. Page download frequency was configurable in this application.

What was the result?

Outcome of implementing SDT Buzzer was really good. First of all, I stopped monitoring and refreshing a web page on daily basis. I didn’t miss even a single SLA during my tenure in CSC. When I demoed to it to my manager, he appreciated my effort in front of everyone.

Within a month of implementing the tool, SDT Buzzer resulted into denial of service attack. Actually what happened, one day IT department decided to do the regular maintenance of the system. They brought down the server of service desk ticket system. After upgrading the application when server was re-started, it didn’t come up. They found an application is continuously hitting the server and that is why its not coming up. They identified that these requests are coming from my machine IP address. Customer reported a complaint and my manager was highly unhappy with this incident. I was asked not to run this application in future. I had a meeting with my manager and informed him that there was a bug in my application. In case of failure it was sending page download request in a loop without any wait. I informed him that I have fixed it and this problem won’t happen again in future. When I was leaving CSC, my manager asked me to implement this tool for all portfolio teams. This was a big success for me.

Why or how did it make a difference and change things?

SDT Buzzer helped CSC significantly to bring down the support cost. They gradually reduced the head count by 50%. They realized, most of the developers were engaged in manual monitoring and were not doing anything productive. That is why they had huge attrition also. When automated monitoring was implemented, engineers were not wasting their time in manual monitoring. They deployed less engineers and all were having several bugs/tickets to fix issues.

SDT Buzzer minimized the waste in the system by automating manual monitoring. This tool helped my previous organization to save more money and motivate engineers by providing them full day job. This tool resulted into win-win situation for both employees and organization. Also they had very good customer satisfaction index.