CP Citizens Response Tracker

Background

Project Support Services (PSS) is a delivery line in Capital Projects that addresses service requests that come through 311 and may be tied to a project within Capital Projects. PSS previously relied on spreadsheets and emails to track service requests and the amount of days each agent took to address a service request, but they have requested our team to create a tool that would streamline the process and provide data insights.

Why do we need this app?

PSS requested a tool that would allow their team to track, collaborate, and audit service requests as well as capture KPIs such as average handle time, workload capacity, total requests, and other data insights. In order for our team to deliver a product that fit the PSS team's needs, we identified the "why" behind their request.

• To move away from unsustainable practices, and create faster process for addressing and updating service requests.
• Provide data-driven insights to managers which allows them to assess how service requests are being handled, workload capacity, and more.
• Encourage collaboration to close service requests (ex: if a team member is out of office, another person can pick up and close the service request.)

Considering the "why's," we determined a few important necessities for the app:

• User permissions
• Audit log and commenting
• Reporting/dashboard

Our vision

Based on the "why's" and needs we evaluated, we decided there should be two user roles with slightly different features for each role. While data insights can be useful, we determined that only managers and executive level team members needed access to reports and dashboards. The regular employee on the PSS team has the sole focus of inputting and closing service requests in the Service Request module. As a result, we have "admin" users and "contributor" users. Contributors do not have access to reports and dashboards, but all users can view all service requests in the system. To also create space for app expansion and manager features, we broke the app features out into modules, or different pages within the app:

• Service requests: accessible to all users. PSS can add and manage service requests here.
• Reporting: accessible to admin users. Managers can view data here and adjust graphs from year-to-date and so on.
• Admin: accessible to admin users. Managers use this add/remove users to the system as well as manage content.

We also made the decision to include a section where all users can see and leave comments as well as view audit logs to incite collaboration among the team and give managers a paper trail to follow if needed.

And lastly, we wanted to give managers the options of viewing insights generic insights as well as more detailed data insights. When discussing with the PSS manager, we discovered that the most important information he checks on is how many service requests are open or closed, the progress on open requests, and how service requests are distributed among team members. Upon further discussion, we assessed each graph reads differently depending on the time frame. According to the PSS team, service requests should not take any longer than 5 days to close, therefore we found that managers would like to see data points from the last 30 days on a daily basis. In the context of reviewing overall team performance, managers might like to see the data from a year-to-date perspective. Using the knowledge we gained from our discussion with the PSS team, we gave the managers 3 charts to refer to in the Service Request module. The Reporting module gave the same data, but provided managers with more context in different time perspectives.

Outcome

This was one of the first projects I worked on that played with data and how many different ways there are to present it. The combination of data analytics and design is certainly a skill I am determined to master. But this was a great project to get a taste of what it's like to read and interpret data as well as understanding the client's needs and pain points alongside the data. The app was well received and is currently used daily by the PSS team to address service requests that come their way.