Requirement
The client, a large UK Insurance company needed a way to quantify the business impact of a poorly performing IT system so they could understand the severity of the issue and evaluate improvement investment.
Challenges
Main sheet showing the model input fields
The system had users in multiple UK and international locations who used different parts of the system for different purposes. The system was suffering intermittent performance problems that rendered it slow to unusable at times. Performance monitoring software was used to gather response time data but
Solution
The solution was a custom built Excel calculation model. Performance data was copied into the model and combined with the users’ working profiles to calculate the business impact for a given time period.
The model allowed the user to adjust start and end times, system use profiles and response time thresholds. The calculator used a linear degradation model to calculate the number of productive hours lost. The spreadsheet also included a log of incidents so the performance history could be tracked.
Design Highlights
This spreadsheet demonstrates how large amounts of data can be analysed and modelled to produce consistent and useful information.