Reducing Ticket Lifetime in the IAM Service by 66%

The average lifetime of incidents in the central IAM service decreased from six days to only two.

Initial Situation

At a global pharma and chemical company with tens of thousands of employees, the SLA (service level agreement) for central IAM (Identity and Access Management) support had not been met for several months and the maximum ticket age for incidents had been significantly exceeded. A Six Sigma for IT project was launched to restore SLA compliance.

Six-Month DMAIC Project

The project followed the standard DMAIC phases of Six Sigma over a six-month period.

These phases are generally described in the following article:

Systematically improve your IT operations with Six Sigma for IT

From vague to deliverable

The customer's complaint, "Incident resolution takes too long," was translated into a concrete deliverable:

“Incidents should be resolved within three business days.”

Methods and analyses:

• A process capability analysis showed that 73% of tickets exceeded the upper limit.

• A cause-and-effect analysis revealed ambiguities in the incident handling process.

Improvement measures:

1. Refinement of the process flow diagram and communication to support agents.

2. Implementation of a regular control process with defined corrective actions.

Results

The average lifetime of incidents in the central IAM service was reduced by 66%, from 6 days to 2.