Development and evaluation of a web based monitoring system

Abstract

Siemens Business Services (SBS) Department 6211-CIC is a Customer Interaction Center (CIC). The CIC consists of Service Desk (SD) teams which helps customers with ICT problems, mostly over the phone. Each of the SD teams has a Team Leader who is in charge, and there is an Escalation Manager and a Department Manager in the department. Each of SBS’s customers has a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with SBS where their relationship is described. Our task has been to develop and evaluate a web based monitoring system to help SBS get SLAs within target. We used Contextual Design as our design method for the new system. Contextual Design is a User Centered Design method which focuses on making a usable system. During the process of Contextual Design we interviewed Team Leaders and Escalation Managers, created models of their work today, designed work models for the new system, designed the new system, and created a paper prototype. The Rational Unified Process was selected as the development process. The process focuses on UML, and we created UML documents based on the results we got from Contextual Design. We programmed a nearly finished system before we used a heuristic evaluation method to evaluate the usability of the system. The result from the evaluation was used to conduct a new round of programming where the usability problems and system shortages that were discovered were fixed, resulting in an iterative development process. When the program was changed and the errors corrected we conducted a user test which resulted in more problems and new system shortages. The problems were fixed into a new version of the program and the documentation. We conducted a second user test on the new version which indicated that the system has become more usable and that we had succeeded with adding the system shortages.