Development Simulation Model for IT - Projects Management Support in a Consulting Company

Today, to stay competitive every company turns to use some or another information system. Every day many IT consulting companies implement projects of IT systems deployment, alteration, and updating. Every successfully introduced system requires maintenance by technical specialists who assist the system users in solving various incidents and problems associated with the system specifics, deployment errors, and erroneous system use. The project maintenance process is hard to assess, hence the difficulties with evaluation of the maintenance personnel’s performance. Furthermore, it is even more difficult to allocate human resources for maintenance of IT projects correctly. One of the main challenges in the maintenance process assessment and resource allocation is absence of handy and functional tools which could be used by maintenance department managers for assignment of maintenance engineers to the projects based upon their competences, experience, and expertise. The purpose of this paper is to improve process of IT project maintenance by a consulting company through its automation. The topic of the research is the process of IT project maintenance by a consulting company. The subject of the research is the subprocess of IT project maintenance management by a consulting company. The following tasks were completed during the research: structure of data required for analysis of consulting company’s IT project maintenance was identified; the consulting company’s data required for analysis of IT project maintenance was prepared; collected data was analyzed to find correlation between different parameters using linear regression method; and a simulation model was developed to assess effectiveness of IT project maintenance by consulting company on the basis of the correlations, which would be useful for IT maintenance managers in improving resource allocation for the projects.