FICTIONAL TRAINING FILE - The City of Fernhollow, its staff, residents and data are invented for the CPS HR Microsoft 365 Copilot workshop. Do not use real work data.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF: SERVICE REQUEST IMPROVEMENT PROJECT
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Prepared for: Renata Vossberg, Department Director · Prepared by: Jordan Ekwueme, Senior Analyst · August 29, 2026 · Phase 1 (Diagnosis) findings


Purpose
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This brief summarizes what Phase 1 learned about the growth in the service-request backlog and proposes options for Phase 2. It is a briefing, not a decision document.

Findings
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  1. The backlog doubled in five months. Open requests at the end of the month rose from 135 in January 2026 to 270 in May 2026.
  2. Residents are waiting longer. Average days to resolve rose from 6.1 days in January to 8.4 days in June 2026.
  3. Many requests start in the wrong place. In a sample of 300 requests from April and May, 31 percent were first routed to the wrong unit and had to be re-routed, adding an estimated 1 to 2 days each. This is a sample estimate, not a count of all requests.
June was an exception: staff completed more requests than were received (completion rate above 100 percent) by clearing older requests during a focused effort, so the backlog fell in June.

Recommendations
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  1. Add a single intake triage step so each request is routed to the right unit the first time.
  2. Publish a weekly backlog report to unit supervisors.
  3. Send residents a plain-language status update when a request is acknowledged and when it is extended.

Risks
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  - Staffing: 4 of 22 positions are vacant; triage may move workload rather than reduce it.
  - Data quality: August data will be incomplete because of the planned case-system migration.
  - Equity: residents who do not use the online portal may not benefit equally from portal-based status updates.

Next steps
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  - Phase 2 (Design): September and October 2026.
  - Proposed pilot: November 2026 through January 2027, if approved by the Department Director.
  - Results review: February 2027.

Note: This brief does not set deadlines. Response deadlines are set only by Procedure SR-100.
