How do you measure performance in winter maintenance? This is a really good question and it is one that has received quite a lot of interest and research over the years. One such research project has just finished, and the end result is the NCHRP Report 889 “Performance Measures in Snow and Ice Operations.”
The report itself has four key recommendations:
- Use weather events as your primary mode of measuring your performance. The implication here is that a seasonal approach to performance does not allow enough opportunity for managing change if needed.
- Develop an index for your weather events, to tell you whether a given event is severe and if so, how severe. Also develop an index for the whole winter season.
- Make sure you define your level of service carefully, and make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to measuring whether or not you have met the LOS requirements.
- Report the performance measures you find.
Where are these four recommendations “coming from?” The first is simply saying that when you are measuring things you need to have a start and an end time for the measurements. So, with winter maintenance you take each storm event on its own merits. Of course, life is a little more complicated than that. If you use anti-icing, you will be doing things associated with the storm (applying liquids on all your routes, for example) before the storm begins. And in most cases, you will still be doing some plowing and clean-up after the storm. Should you consider the time you spend hauling away snow after a storm as part of the effort of dealing with that storm? Or, should it be more classified as a season long activity?
The answer is that “it depends.” If you always get to haul away snow (from downtown streets or from bridges) after each storm, then you can include that effort in your efforts for the storm. But we all know that sometimes the storms come so quickly and heavily (think Massachusetts a few winters ago) that you are too busy fighting the storms to do the clean-up after each storm.
The other benefit of doing a “storm by storm” approach is that it allows you to identify issues quickly. And once identified, they can be corrected. But if you do not know about it, you cannot correct it.
The index for weather events is critical for normalizing your efforts. If a storm is particularly bad it is going to take more effort to deal with it, than if it is a nice, gentle snow storm. You need to have a way of saying “this storm was this bad on a scale of 1 to 10.”
Level of service is clearly critical, and having that well defined is of great benefit. But, the second part of this point is that you need not only to have the levels well defined, but the method of measuring the level of service that you have achieved needs to be well defined as well.
And finally, why are you measuring the performance that you achieve? Well, to improve your own performance, but also to let the people paying the bills (that would be the public!) know about how well you are providing them services. It can be useful to say “well, we did this but if we had different equipment for example, we could maybe do this more efficiently.” So, don’t just make the measurements, share the measurements openly. That may be a bit of a change for some agencies, but it does appear to be a good and useful thing to do.
So, those were the four key recommendations in the recent report, but of course, there was a lot more in there (155 pages worth!). We will be unpacking the rest of the report over the coming months and putting it into a number of our one pagers as we go, so keep a close eye out for them!