Mainstay of the software industry still happens to be Maintenance projects. Production Support forms a major chunk of work in these projects. While there are production support projects of varied types and complexity, a large number of them involve addressing customer calls and applying immediate fixes to reported problems. In stable, steady projects, problems reported tend to be of consistent frequency and complexity over a large period of time. Yet, one faces problems in balancing the conflicting needs of defined Service Level Agreements, resource utilization, budget and ensuring proper system stability. This is getting increasingly relevant today as more projects move towards fixed-bid business model. This paper demonstrates the use of Queuing theory in estimating the number of resources necessary to form the support team so that the project is optimized in terms of resource cost, service and waiting time for problem reports; while minimizing number of unaddressed problem reports and resource idle time.

Mahua Seth, Manager - Process and Quality Group has over 12 years of experience in Quality Management, and Statistical Process Control. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Metallurgical Engineering and Master’s in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Florida Atlantic University, USA.

Arunabha Sengupta, Assistant Manager - Process and Quality Group has over 9 years of experience in the Software industry in delivery as well as process consultancy and management. He is a Master of Statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.