Dynamic modelling of service delivery

Planning to deliver excellent service by balancing demand and supply in the context of a set of business policies is not an easy task. How an organisation dynamically deploys its resources and people in response to external demand determines how quickly an organisation can deliver service to its customers. To model this you need to represent the flows of work through the organisation, the resources available and the relationships between intake of work, outputs, workstacks and time-to-deliver. You also need to understand how flexible the organisation is in dealing with uncertain and fluctuating intakes and the policies the organisation adopts in deploying this flexibility. We have constructed a model of the operations of a telecommunications company that incorporates all of these elements using the system dynamics approach. This paper describes how the model is constructed and gives examples of how it can be used to explain observed behaviours. It also explains how it has been used to guide decision making on resource requirements and the optimum mix between proactive and reactive approaches to service assurance.