QNT/561 Help

The TJF Company as an organization is seeking strong external Information Technology (IT) support. There is a contract that is under review for the current outside contractor and TJF Company needs to determine if it is in the best interest of the business to continue the contract or to look elsewhere for other support. In this report the data from randomized surveys has been collected and analyzed and a correlation is attempted to be proven or disproven between the satisfaction of the issue requestor, and the satisfaction of TJF Company’s customer base. The conclusion proven was TJF Company should acquire a new contractor to perform its help desk work. Multiple challenges were discovered in this survey and a discussion is presented for future research that would provide possible resolution to these issues.

Research Plan

Our team may follow a research plan by dividing the business research project into multiple phases:

1. Phase I – Set Hypothesis Question

2. Phase II – Conduct Survey/Interview

3. Phase III – Perform Data Analysis

4. Phase IV – Present Results.

Phase I

The Question

Is there a direct correlation found with the satisfaction level of IT service the employees receive and the impact to their ability to properly support their customer? This question is the research question that will be studied through surveys and empirical data in order to determine the eligibility of the current help desk contractor going into contract negotiations.

Hypothesis

H0: There is a direct correlation between the satisfaction level of IT service the employees receive and enabling them to properly support their customer?

Ha: There is not a direct correlation between the satisfaction level of IT service the employees receive and enabling them to properly support their customer?

Phase II

Sampling Method

In order to prepare a random sampling method we first need to look at the population. For this survey we have a population of approximately five hundred individuals. Since we do not have a large population we will be pulling the sample by taking the first one hundred non-repeated respondents that voluntarily complete the survey. According to McClave, Benson, & Sincich, 2011, the simple random sampling method works best for the size, range, and scope of the population and research question. We also chose this research method because each caller has the possibility of being chosen to complete the survey. Lastly, there are two demographic questions to better understand what factors may influence a respondent’s answers, interests, and opinions.

After each employee responds to a questionnaire, the answers will be stored in a databank. The file will be password protected and only the members of our team will have accessibility. Because the survey will be stored by a ticket number and not a name; the employees will be anonymous to our team. Our collection of data will be gathered on a weekly basis for three months.

Once we receive a completed survey the corresponding ticket information will be used allowing us to look at each ticket in correlation to its individual survey results. Questions will be worded to elicit specific open and close ended responses as well as produce specific responses, with values assigned to each response of Very Satisfied – Satisfied – Neutral – Dissatisfied – Very Dissatisfied. A list of the questions is located in Appendix A. These values will receive a numerical equivalent of 1 (Very Satisfied) to 5 (Very Dissatisfied). This method is based on the Likert rating scale. Likert scaling uses a 1-5 rating scale or 1-7 disagree-agree response scale (Survey Methods, 1997). This will allow us to calculate our descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, and variance) and link them to the numerical value of the time taken on the ticket. All numerical values found and the calculations we have come up with are in the attached spreadsheet. By comparing the amount of time taken to the results of the survey we should be able to determine if there is any correlation between the two points. In theory this will allow us to be able to identify the outliers and provide a possible explanation for them.

The key for the TJF Company employee satisfaction survey is as follows:

Phase III

Analysis of Results

Once the results of the survey were in they were careful tabulated and calculated based on a 95% confidence test (Appendix B). We used a 95% confidence interval hypothesis test combined with a T-test in order to calculate the difference between the hypothesized value for the satisfaction level and the mean. We used three as the hypothesized value since that would show an average acceptability. We believe a 95% calculation was sufficient in this case since we would be able to provide a reasonable recommendation based on the numbers provided. We were able to determine, based on the p value of 1.79 indicates that the null hypothesis should be accepted and is consistent with the data. P value is > 0.05, therefore; it is within 5% confidence the majority of employees are dissatisfied with IT support.

The team also performed the regression analysis and calculation in Appendix B, to reach the conclusive evidence and calculation performed and value of the R-square “0.03386” there is very weak correlation between the two selected variables for this research. Furthermore, value of t-stat “1.85327” is significantly higher than the p-value, “0.06685” therefore; with 95% or significant level of 0.05 confidences, the team can reject the H0.

Question One

Were you satisfied that your ticket was picked up and started in a timely manner? This question is gathering information if there was a delay with obtaining help.

Question Two

Were you satisfied that the ticket you submitted was resolved in a timely manner? This question consists if you were satisfied with length of time to resolve your issue.

Question Three

Were you satisfied that the issue you had was resolved completely? This question was verifying if your question was completely answered is important especially when there is a time constraint.

Question Four

Were you satisfied that the help desk verified that all aspects of the issue were resolved? The issue was answered completely without any unresolved questions.

Question Five

Were you satisfied with the service you received from the help desk? Overall, how to you rate from beginning to end your experience with IT Help Desk.

Question Six

What is the highest grade or year of school you completed? This question is regarding thought processing; whether one has the time to refer to IT or take it upon themselves to research the issue.

Question Seven

What is your current professional level? This question is pertaining to an employee’s educational experience based on the extent of judgment and decisions within their position in the company.

Phase IV

Recommendations

Once the results were determined, we are able to see a correlation in the data. The mean results showed a high level of dissatisfaction with the current service; therefore, we recommend that TJF Company find a new contractor to do its help desk work. The business problem that was studied is specifically whether or not the current help desk is providing competent and satisfactory service. We believe the results were conclusive enough to make a satisfactory recommendation.

The challenges we faced were the fact that many of the respondents only were willing to respond when they had a negative experience. We discovered that this skewed the results somewhat as we received a higher proportion of negative results than positive. We also found that some of our respondents were not directly involved with our external customers which concerned us as it was part of the original research question. We recommend that future researchers are more selective in the respondents in order to choose individual responses from tickets that directly relate to the external customer base. In order to prevent the issue with primarily negative responses we recommend possibly setting a business requirement that all surveys should be completed and then randomly chosen by date instead of by who responds first.

In order for future researches to have less difficulty it is recommended that they take more time in the study, perhaps spreading out the survey timeframe over multiple months or even creating a database of surveys that span an entire year. This will give a broader representation of the work that was done by the outside company. Possible separate future research could be a poll of the customers themselves in order to determine whether they are affected by the work that is done by the contractors. Another possible research option is a study of the systems to see how the customer interacts with any of the programs that are run by TJF Company.

Conclusion

When discussing this research project, our team realized that we could gather sufficient data to support our problem statement. After further review and evaluation, we decided that we would use existing research that had been collected in the workplace along with gathering additional new data through survey. Having a research plan in place made sure we did not lose focus on the main objectives of our research topic and we remained consistent with data integrity.

References

Lake Tahoe Community College. (2014, 08 10). Small confidence Level Table. Retrieved 08 16, 2014, from www.Itconline.net: http://www.ltcconline.net/greenl/courses/201/estimation/smallConfLevelTable.htm

Survey Methods. (1997, Dec 14). Wisconsin State Journal. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/390945611?accountid=458

Appendix A: Research Survey Questions

Question 1: Were you satisfied that your ticket was picked up and started in a timely manner?

Question 2: Were you satisfied that the ticket you submitted was resolved in a timely manner?

Question 3: Were you satisfied that the issue you had was resolved completely?

Question 4: Were you satisfied with the service you received from the help desk?

Question 5: Were you satisfied that the help desk verified that all aspects of the issue were resolved?

Question 6: What is the highest grade or year of school you completed?

Question 7: What is your current professional level?

Appendix B: Confidence level of 95%

To calculate a 95% confidence interval use Za/2 * σ/√(n)

Za/2 retrieved using an electronic table (Lake Tahoe Community College, 2014)

Za/2 = 1.96

n = 100

Using this data would leave an equation of 1.96 * σ/10