Designing a Bot for Efficient Distribution of Service Requests
This addresses ticket management inefficiencies for Walmart's agile project management, but it is incremental as it applies an existing bot concept to a specific corporate context.
The paper tackled the problem of efficiently assigning service request tickets to engineers in Walmart's distributed operations by introducing an automated bot, which reduced assignment disparity and decreased average ticket resolution time, improving experience for reporters and engineers.
The tracking and timely resolution of service requests is one of the major challenges in agile project management. Having an efficient solution to this problem is a key requirement for Walmart to facilitate seamless collaboration across its different business units. The Jira software is one of the popular choices in industries for monitoring such service requests. A service request once logged into the system by a reporter is referred to as a (Jira) ticket which is assigned to an engineer for servicing. In this work, we explore how the tickets which may arise in any of the Walmart stores and offices distributed over several countries can be assigned to engineers efficiently. Specifically, we will discuss how the introduction of a bot for automated ticket assignment has helped in reducing the disparity in ticket assignment to engineers by human managers and also decreased the average ticket resolution time - thereby improving the experience for both the reporters and the engineers. Additionally, the bot sends reminders and status updates over different business communication platforms for timely tracking of tickets; it can be suitably modified to provision for human intervention in case of special needs by some teams. The current study conducted over data collected from various teams within Walmart shows the efficacy of our bot.