The question behind this project

Which city service requests take longer to resolve?

Someone reports a broken streetlight or a problem on their street. What happens next? New York’s 311 records let us compare workloads, completed requests, and the cases still waiting.

Read the analysis

Painting of a resident reporting a pothole with a phone while a city crew repairs a marked section of a New York street.

Operational analytics An analytical case study

Service requests and response times in New York City

Where do request volume and resolution delay intersect?

New York 311 service records

The finding

Prioritization requires both volume and delay, with agency and complaint mix held in view. A ranking alone cannot explain a bottleneck.

Analytical work

Turn service-request records into a transparent view of workloads, closure times, due-date coverage, and geographic patterns.

FIG. 01Illustrative example

How a service request is recorded and its resolution time calculated

01Request receivedCreated date
02Agency assignedCompare workload
03Open or closedStatus at extraction

Resolution time = closed date − created date

Reading guide, not measured stage durations. The 311 snapshot contains current statuses, not a complete event log. SLA comparisons need both a closure date and a due date; unresolved requests must remain visible separately.

Follow the request groups

The flow diagram groups requests by agency, complaint, and recorded status. Its width represents volume. Status-derived stages describe the available records; they are not a sequence of timestamped handoffs or measured time spent in each stage.

Separate completed work from the open queue

Resolution time is computed from creation to closure for completed requests. Open requests have no final duration yet. Reading closed-request times without the open queue can make a backlog disappear from the performance discussion.

Compare like work before assigning a cause

Inspect complaint mix, volume, and due-date availability when comparing agencies or boroughs. A compliance percentage only describes records with a defined due date. Long observed delays identify a review candidate, not proof of insufficient staffing.

Decision supported

What to do with this evidence

Select an agency–complaint combination with material volume and delay for a process review. Verify operational context and open-case aging before proposing a staffing change.

What this analysis cannot establish

Recorded statuses do not reconstruct full case histories. Missing due dates limit the population represented by SLA comparisons.
Open-case overdue classification uses the enrichment run date. Rebuilding the same source later can change compliance results; record the run date when comparing outputs.

Continue the investigation