Utah DOT Case Study-answer my following question after you read the attached

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noene_008

Engineering

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Utah DOT Case Study.pdfTo help preparing your case study, include the following in your summary: * Top management and it's influence on asset management.
* Influence of automated data
* Process time
* Communication between asset management and regional staff
* The need for continues improvement
* Accountability
* Importance of management practices and data systems for successful asset management.

Detailed questions on case study includes:
- How did Utah create their asset management program?

- How was asset management and performance matrices for transportation system linked?
- What is " strategic direction and performance measures"?
- How did Utah support its asset management program and what are the characteristics of a successful asset management?
- How did Utah develop the data system and business process?
- Why was pavement management system and asset management described as "unreliable" and "unclear"? And how did the asset management staff solve this?
- How did Utah improve their data process? Was specific or all data included in the database? Was data collected for statewide or specific mileage?
- How was decentralization improved?
- Discuss strategies for [pavement selection, budget, road classifications, network management].
- Maintenance data from operations management system [OMS) stored extensive data for various sections as stated in the case study. What did OMS manage? And how was effectiveness measured?
- How does maintenance interact with asset management?
- How does the Department forecast its project selection?

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Utah DOT Case Study _____________________________________________________________ Utah’s Asset Management Beginnings In preparation for the 2002 Winter Olympics, the Utah DOT completed a $1.5 billion design/build reconstruction and expansion of I-15 through the heart of Salt Lake City. As the department’s leaders readied the modern facility for its opening, they also pondered their long-term approach to ensuring it remains in sound condition throughout its service life. They describe having an epiphany in which it occurred to them that they should undertake the same comprehensive effort to maintain I-15 as they put into building it. Department Director John Njord led the top management through a three-day workshop and self-evaluation of the department’s Asset Management practices. One of the participants described it as a painful process. It was painful both in the length and detail of the analysis as well as in terms of the team recognizing that it lacked a comprehensive Asset Management approach. From the process, however, the important seeds were sown to create a comprehensive Asset Management program. First, the top-down involvement of the Utah DOT leadership served an important “change management” function. In change management, it is important to provide institutional legitimacy to a change, which the director’s involvement provided. Second, the effort was followed by monthly meetings until the Asset Management process was well under way. Those meetings helped to ensure that momentum was gained by the fledgling effort. Three, the workshop and subsequent efforts served as clear points of change for the department. They represented that one era was ending and that a new era of Asset Management was beginning. Such demarcation is an important feature of changing behavior in a large organization by clearly communicating that the organization has embraced a new direction. Without such emphatic “pivoting” of the organization, bureaucratic inertia can stifle change. Finally, the UDOT leadership insisted that Asset Management become “institutionalized” by creating the policies, manuals, organizational structures and data systems to provide common definitions, common understanding, and a common approach to Asset Management throughout the department. Although the Utah leadership may not have described their efforts at the time as conscious “Change Management,” the actions they took with their top-level involvement and engagement were typical of classic “Change Management” strategies. Those actions appear to encapsulate the type of engagement necessary by Asset Management advocates to ingrain the practice in their organization. Performance Management Linkage Also in the early 2000s, the Utah DOT was embracing performance metrics and Performance Management, say its officials who were involved at the time. Like so many other officials in other agencies, they quickly recognized the linkage between Asset Management and producing performance metrics for the transportation system. They began by setting goals for what level of pavement and bridge conditions they wanted to sustain for the highway system. The emphasis on both achieving and then sustaining those conditions over time with limited resources strongly influenced their recognition of the benefits of performance management. Among their initial targets were to have 90 percent of the Interstate System, 70 percent of the arterial system and 50 percent of the collector system meeting smoothness standards. Once steps are taken to sustain those goals, both Asset Management and the regular monitoring of performance inherent performance management appear to be self-evidently logical to the organization, Utah officials said. Today, the department produces both extensive Asset Management data but it also produces an annual “Strategic Direction and Performance Measures” report. This report is like an annual corporate report in that it describes major issues facing the department and describes the agency’s performance in addressing these issues. Within the larger set of performance metrics that it reports in the Strategic Direction document are high- level performance metrics on how it is managing its highway assets. Creating an Asset Management Structure Over its seven year journey, the Utah DOT created both organizational structures and data systems to support its Asset Management approach. The two parallel efforts were closely linked and complementary, and they illustrate the duality of successful Asset Management efforts. Successful Asset Management organizations have not only sound data systems to provide decision makers good information but they have organizational processes which ensure that the logic of Asset Management is followed during the decision making process. To develop both the data systems and business processes, the Utah DOT pursued the following comprehensive series of efforts. • It created a Transportation Asset Management Committee (TRANSMAT). This consists of the UDOT senior leaders, members of the Asset Management Team and several Asset Management Groups. TRANSMAT is responsible for overseeing and approving all of the Asset Management efforts within the department. It ensures that “people, plans and processes” are in place to meet the asset management goals. • It established an Asset Management Team under a Director for Asset Management. Within the Asset Management Team is an Asset Management Engineer’s position. • It developed an Asset Management Strategic Plan. This outlined the goals and objectives for the continuous, incremental improvement of the Asset Management process. • An Asset Management Implementation Plan was developed. This plan was intended to outline and track the steps necessary to achieve the objectives of the Strategic Plan. • Reorganization to achieve the Asset Management objectives was completed. The pavement asset group section was reorganized to align with the new strategies and tactics. • An Asset Management Manual was developed. It explains to department personnel how to implement the asset management practices within the department. • A UDOT Asset Management Strategic Planning model was developed. This served as the guide to developing project recommendations within the UDOT Long Range Plan. It relied upon forecasting long-term needs and optimizing investment options between programs to achieve the highest system conditions possible with available resources. • An asset management data base was developed. It was created to facilitate optimizing both within various asset categories but also to allow for the first step toward cross-asset optimization and tradeoff analysis. • The pavement and bridge management systems were enhanced. • Development of an Asset Management Strategic Analysis was completed. This enhancement to the computerized Asset Management System allowed “silo” or “stove pipe” analysis of five different classes of assets. These were pavements, structures, safety, maintenance and mobility. Initial example runs of cross-asset optimization analyses were conducted for demonstration purposes and to allow further investigation by the DOT. • An Operations Management System (OMS) and a complementary Maintenance Management Quality Assurance System were created. The OMS was developed to manage the work program for maintenance forces, to schedule and report daily work activities, and to analyze the maintenance business processes. The Quality Assurance System measures conditions in nine different maintenance categories to allow continuous assessment of maintenance performance and conditions. Lessons Learned: Engagement and Evolution Utah officials say that their experience taught them lessons in how to achieve organizational acceptance of Asset Management. As already mentioned, the top leadership was engaged, clear messages of change were articulated and Asset Management was given emphasis until it became routine. An additional requirement that the Utah officials said they recognized over time was the need to fully engage mid-level region staff. These staff members were being exposed to new management philosophies, new pavement management tactics, new types of computerized pavement management reports and new demands to provide consistent data. Each of these new concepts required consistent, on-going training in order to achieve widespread understanding and acceptance of Asset Management. The Asset Management staff faced skepticism in the regions because of misunderstandings about the project-level outputs of the early phases of the pavement management model. As with most pavement management models, the output data, forecasts and budgets are more accurate over a long period of time and across an entire network. The accuracy of any one forecast for a particular pavement section in a particular year is much less valid. However, the pavement management reports were being generated and provided to the regions. Region personnel would find discrepancies between the pavement conditions they knew to exist in the field with what the conditions reported for individual sections by the pavement management model. Such discrepancies led to complaints that the pavement management system, and Asset Management, were “black boxes” that were unclear and unreliable. The Asset Management staff went to every region to meet with the staff and to analyze the problems with the data, the system outputs and with the region personnel’s understanding of the pavement management process. The Asset Management staff said they found that many of the data inputs were incorrect, therefore the model outputs were incorrect. Because the pavement management system had not been extensively relied upon before for pavement funding and selection decisions, it was not maintained adequately. The estimates of how much treatments actually cost were outdated, or imprecise. The pavement condition assessments for the model were manually collected, and wide variability in the rating of pavements was found. They reported that one section of pavement over four years was rated as a 70, 100, 70 and 50, even though it had experienced no treatments over that time. They also realized that many staff did not understand the specific section treatment recommendations which come from a financially constrained optimization pavement model. Under one funding scenario, certain treatments of certain pavement sections were recommended. Under another funding scenario, other treatments were recommended. The logic behind the differing model recommendations was not fully understood, and therefore the entire process was viewed as unreliable, the Asset Management staff report. At that time, the regions also were responsible for collecting some of the pavement distress data. Visual inspections were conducted of the first tenth of a mile of sample sections. The Asset Management staff said they realized that some region personnel did not understand the rating process, they performed it inconsistently and they did not rely upon the data for their own decision process. “I know what was said,” reported one Asset Management staff. “ ‘Central Office wants this data and I don’t know why but let’s send them some data.’ That was the central problem, they did not see any benefit from this. It was only work.” The Utah leadership realized that the journey of continuous improvement required additional training, as well as improved data processes. They changed from manual pavement condition assessment to automated assessment in order to get more frequent, comprehensive and consistent pavement condition data. Now, with their automated pavement assessment process they can get condition on a full mile of every section, as opposed to the one-tenth of a mile they could produce manually. Also, the data is more consistent, and frequent. The entire highway network can be assessed in two years. They analyze the interstate system in both directions annually. The Utah experience also shows the importance of explaining what management systems can do well, and what they can’t. The use of a pavement management system was important to setting overall system goals and budgets. However, it became apparent that the short-comings of a pavement management system at the project level needed to be clarified. The pavement management system’s project-level recommendations were not consistent with what region personnel were seeing in the field, leading to skepticism about the validity of the management systems, say the Utah Asset Management staff. “The regions looked at the output and said this isn’t right,” said one Asset Management official. The evolution of Utah’s Asset Management process illustrates the need to raise the understanding of asset management, and its components such as pavement management, across a broad spectrum of departmental staff. Most departments are decentralized in many aspects. The decentralization provides the benefit of keeping decisions rooted in the reality of what is actually happening in the field. Decentralization also increases the complexity of the training process, particularly when management systems are deployed as a new tool in the decision-making process. The department has evolved and refined important aspects of its pavement management, and pavement project selection processes over time to improve its decentralized process. It has developed several institutional processes, groups and reports in order to perpetuate a continuous evaluation of how well the pavement process is working. In the decentralized Utah structure, each region has its own pavement management engineer who does pavement designs for the region. However, the region pavement engineer and the materials engineers participate in a statewide pavement team. This participation provides key region pavement decision makers access to information about statewide practices. The participation not only serves to disseminate statewide information to the regions, it allows peer exchange between the regions, as well as region feedback to central office. The intention of the statewide participation is to generate consistency in decision making, to solicit broad input into pavement issues and to provide feedback between field and central office decision makers. The continuous interaction provides information which is used to continually refine data elements, such as true project costs, the actual pavement conditions and accurate information about pavement performance compared to forecasted performance. This feedback continually improves the overall decision making process. In addition to the periodic group meetings between region and central office personnel, the central office staff travel to each region annually for field visits. This allows the central office staff to review conditions on the roadway with the regions, and to evaluate the correlation between the reported and forecast conditions, and actual conditions in the field. These formal and informal exchanges are intended to create a broad consensus and understanding of the pavement management process. The central office asset management personnel said such visits have provided valuable insight and quality-control information. From such interactions and visits they determined that their model was providing poor forecasts of cracking. What the model showed to be good performing sections were actually found to be suffering extensive cracking when viewed in the field The Utah asset management officials said while communication is critical to instilling asset management in an organization, the communication needs to be two way. The central office experts need to communicate about the powerful analytic and decision-making potential of the pavement management system, and its data bases. At the same time, the central office personnel can learn a great deal from the day-to-day field experience of the region personnel. The continuous and open communication between central office and field personnel is an important component of continually improving the pavement management process, they noted. Like with many other departments, the Utah asset management approach to optimization is a hybrid of both computational forecasts from the pavement management system combined with the professional engineering judgment of the staff in the field. The central office provides pavement program scenarios to each region illustrating an optimized program of projects generated from the statewide model. The regions review those lists of suggested projects but make the actual pavement selections. The consideration of both the model’s optimized list of projects combined with the field observations and experience of the region allows the insights of both the management system and the field personnel to be captured in the final pavement program. Once the regions have identified a six year program of projects, the central office staff gives it a high-level review to ensure the program is consistent with the statewide goals. Strategies for Adaption The Utah officials say their ever-improving pavement management process has allowed them to adapt to two critical changes. First, as they experience turnover in region personnel, the existing pavement management process provides significant analytic and institutional support to the new personnel. They find that the new personnel are anxious for insights into past pavement performance, into their range of investment options and about the various program scenarios they could pursue. The central office officials say the pavement management process provides proven templates for new region personnel to follow as they master their new positions. To further ensure consistency in its approach, the department created a Pavement Panel to help new region personnel select pavements. It consists of membership from the regions and central office. It acts like a peer review panel for the new personnel’s program and project decisions. Suggested pavement treatments are explained and put up for a vote by email among the 10 member panel. If at least 7 panelists agree with the selection, it is approved. If fewer than 7 approve, than the individual recommendation is reviewed by Central Office. The process serves to standardize the approach to treatments across the department, and to ensure that extra elements which drive up costs are not included. Also, the pavement management process has provided a rational and structured process for the department to use as it copes with the significantly higher material costs of recent years. Although its pavement program has not been reduced in terms of its overall budget, the purchasing power of that pavement budget has fallen by nearly half in recent years. The department was able to make rational – albeit difficult – tradeoffs in its pavement investment approach based upon its improved analytical capabilities. The department classified its system into Level I routes which include the Interstate Highways and generally the arterial network. The collectors and other minor routes are categorized as Level 2 routes. Pavement treatment priority will go to the Level I routes which carry about 70 percent of the state’s traffic volumes. Those routes will be actively managed and will receive the large majority of the department’s pavement budget. The low-volume Level 2 routes will receive primarily low-cost treatments such as chip seals. In general, the Level 2 routes have average daily traffic of less than 2,000 vehicles, with fewer than 500 trucks. The asset management staff said the difficult process of prioritizing the pavement program under such tight fiscal constraints has brought more region personnel to seek assistance from the pavement management system. The pavement management system has provided an invaluable assistance in providing various scenarios by which the regions can analyze which mix of projects can optimize their system with their limited resources. While the department has relied on its pavement management system for more than a decade for functions such as forecasting overall investment needs, the system now is playing a more critical analytic role because of the intensity of the pavement preservation shortfall. The Utah DOT’s pavement management system and its logical, systematic approach to managing the network helped the department explain to the Utah Transportation Commission the department’s approach to the dramatic increase in prices experienced between 2005 and 2008. Using the analytics from the pavement management system, the staff explained to the commission the department’s intention to pursue a lower cost programmatic approach to sustaining pavement conditions. The logical and systematic process appealed to the Commission, which allowed the department to cope with rising costs by accepting a lower level of condition on the low-volume Level 2 routes. Toward Comprehensive Asset Management Although the examples discussed thus far relate to pavements, the Utah DOT has evolved on a parallel track to a more comprehensive Asset Management process which includes not only pavements but bridges, maintenance items and safety elements. Data from systems affecting all the highway attributes are collected in a central asset management data based purchased from one of the national Asset Management system vendors. The pavement data includes friction data taken statewide on a two-year cycle. One lane was tested each direction, except on divided highways where both directions were tested. One test section was performed on each mile. The data base also was populated with falling weight deflection data taken system wide, with one reading taken per mile. This data was provided for project-level design inputs. A profiler van also collected International Roughness Index data, as well as rutting and concrete faulting data. Again, the data was collected annually on one directional lane, except for the divided highways which had both directions measured. For many years, cracking data was collected by the regions annually. Data was collected for onetenth of a mile sections It was the variability of the manually produced cracking data that led to concerns about the accuracy, frequency and consistency of the data. The department has since moved to an automated distress collection process. It allows data to be collected statewide, not just on tenth-mile long sections. All the pavement data – skid, rutting, IRI, cracking and FWD– is populated into the central asset management database. The department relies on Pontis for its bridge data system. Bridge inspections are conducted every two years, except for structurally deficient bridges which are inspected annually. Likewise, safety data is populated in a Safety Management System, which produces a Safety Index for each mile of roadway. The data includes information regarding crash severity and crash type by location. The system calculates a numeric ranking from the Safety Index for every roadway section. The sections which are elevated in their safety index are considered for additional treatments as part of the other programs including the pavement, bridge and maintenance programs. The maintenance data comes from the Operations Management System (OMS). It stores an extensive amount of data for each section including: Ø Maintenance section delineation; Ø Station boundaries; Ø A snow plan for each section; Ø Shoulder dimensions and profile; Ø Drainage and culvert information; Ø Guardrail and barrier inventory; Ø Sign inventory; Ø Noise walls; Ø Pavement markings; Ø Vegetation management areas; Ø Mowable area; Ø Litter pickup area; Ø Cattle guards and tunnels. The Operations Management System manages the budget, the work programs for maintenance crews, it helps them schedule and it helps measure their effectiveness. The effectiveness is measured by evaluating actual conditions against the maintenance targets, as well as calculating maintenance function costs. The OMS is used for planning, organizing and directing resources. The maintenance functions interact with Asset Management in several ways. Departmental officials say the philosophy of preventive maintenance is deeply ingrained in the organization and its workforce. They believe front-line maintenance workers understand that well maintained roads cost less, and last longer, which complements the Asset Management approach. The integration of pavement condition data, safety data and maintenance data all can influence maintenance decisions. Where the central Asset Management data system indicates there are poor pavement conditions, poor skid numbers or an elevated safety index, the maintenance crews consider what operations they can perform to improve those sections. If the maintenance crews perform a chip seal or other significant treatment, that treatment is captured through the central data base and fed into the pavement system. In these different ways, the activities of the maintenance forces can be influenced by asset condition levels, and conversely, the activities of the maintenance forces can measurably improve asset condition and performance. Not only do the Utah DOT management systems plan and record activities at the front-line maintenance level and the region project-selection level but they also provide comprehensive 20-year plans for the department. Both the bridge management system and the pavement management systems produce 20 year plans, both by region and statewide. They also suggest the treatment by pavement section and structure, treatment cost, overall budget needs and the commensurate level of condition that would be achieved by the forecasted program. The forecasts provide assurance that the asset management program being pursued by the department will achieve its long-term goals of asset sustainability. The department does not use the 20 year forecasts for project selection, but rather for planning purposes and to assess whether overall funding levels are likely to achieve the desired system conditions. The overall result of the various systems and processes is to produce for the Utah DOT a comprehensive asset management process that considers pavements, bridges, and maintenance features and links them to safety considerations. Utah DOT Case Study _____________________________________________________________ Utah’s Asset Management Beginnings In preparation for the 2002 Winter Olympics, the Utah DOT completed a $1.5 billion design/build reconstruction and expansion of I-15 through the heart of Salt Lake City. As the department’s leaders readied the modern facility for its opening, they also pondered their long-term approach to ensuring it remains in sound condition throughout its service life. They describe having an epiphany in which it occurred to them that they should undertake the same comprehensive effort to maintain I-15 as they put into building it. Department Director John Njord led the top management through a three-day workshop and self-evaluation of the department’s Asset Management practices. One of the participants described it as a painful process. It was painful both in the length and detail of the analysis as well as in terms of the team recognizing that it lacked a comprehensive Asset Management approach. From the process, however, the important seeds were sown to create a comprehensive Asset Management program. First, the top-down involvement of the Utah DOT leadership served an important “change management” function. In change management, it is important to provide institutional legitimacy to a change, which the director’s involvement provided. Second, the effort was followed by monthly meetings until the Asset Management process was well under way. Those meetings helped to ensure that momentum was gained by the fledgling effort. Three, the workshop and subsequent efforts served as clear points of change for the department. They represented that one era was ending and that a new era of Asset Management was beginning. Such demarcation is an important feature of changing behavior in a large organization by clearly communicating that the organization has embraced a new direction. Without such emphatic “pivoting” of the organization, bureaucratic inertia can stifle change. Finally, the UDOT leadership insisted that Asset Management become “institutionalized” by creating the policies, manuals, organizational structures and data systems to provide common definitions, common understanding, and a common approach to Asset Management throughout the department. Although the Utah leadership may not have described their efforts at the time as conscious “Change Management,” the actions they took with their top-level involvement and engagement were typical of classic “Change Management” strategies. Those actions appear to encapsulate the type of engagement necessary by Asset Management advocates to ingrain the practice in their organization. Performance Management Linkage Also in the early 2000s, the Utah DOT was embracing performance metrics and Performance Management, say its officials who were involved at the time. Like so many other officials in other agencies, they quickly recognized the linkage between Asset Management and producing performance metrics for the transportation system. They began by setting goals for what level of pavement and bridge conditions they wanted to sustain for the highway system. The emphasis on both achieving and then sustaining those conditions over time with limited resources strongly influenced their recognition of the benefits of performance management. Among their initial targets were to have 90 percent of the Interstate System, 70 percent of the arterial system and 50 percent of the collector system meeting smoothness standards. Once steps are taken to sustain those goals, both Asset Management and the regular monitoring of performance inherent performance management appear to be self-evidently logical to the organization, Utah officials said. Today, the department produces both extensive Asset Management data but it also produces an annual “Strategic Direction and Performance Measures” report. This report is like an annual corporate report in that it describes major issues facing the department and describes the agency’s performance in addressing these issues. Within the larger set of performance metrics that it reports in the Strategic Direction document are high- level performance metrics on how it is managing its highway assets. Creating an Asset Management Structure Over its seven year journey, the Utah DOT created both organizational structures and data systems to support its Asset Management approach. The two parallel efforts were closely linked and complementary, and they illustrate the duality of successful Asset Management efforts. Successful Asset Management organizations have not only sound data systems to provide decision makers good information but they have organizational processes which ensure that the logic of Asset Management is followed during the decision making process. To develop both the data systems and business processes, the Utah DOT pursued the following comprehensive series of efforts. • It created a Transportation Asset Management Committee (TRANSMAT). This consists of the UDOT senior leaders, members of the Asset Management Team and several Asset Management Groups. TRANSMAT is responsible for overseeing and approving all of the Asset Management efforts within the department. It ensures that “people, plans and processes” are in place to meet the asset management goals. • It established an Asset Management Team under a Director for Asset Management. Within the Asset Management Team is an Asset Management Engineer’s position. • It developed an Asset Management Strategic Plan. This outlined the goals and objectives for the continuous, incremental improvement of the Asset Management process. • An Asset Management Implementation Plan was developed. This plan was intended to outline and track the steps necessary to achieve the objectives of the Strategic Plan. • Reorganization to achieve the Asset Management objectives was completed. The pavement asset group section was reorganized to align with the new strategies and tactics. • An Asset Management Manual was developed. It explains to department personnel how to implement the asset management practices within the department. • A UDOT Asset Management Strategic Planning model was developed. This served as the guide to developing project recommendations within the UDOT Long Range Plan. It relied upon forecasting long-term needs and optimizing investment options between programs to achieve the highest system conditions possible with available resources. • An asset management data base was developed. It was created to facilitate optimizing both within various asset categories but also to allow for the first step toward cross-asset optimization and tradeoff analysis. • The pavement and bridge management systems were enhanced. • Development of an Asset Management Strategic Analysis was completed. This enhancement to the computerized Asset Management System allowed “silo” or “stove pipe” analysis of five different classes of assets. These were pavements, structures, safety, maintenance and mobility. Initial example runs of cross-asset optimization analyses were conducted for demonstration purposes and to allow further investigation by the DOT. • An Operations Management System (OMS) and a complementary Maintenance Management Quality Assurance System were created. The OMS was developed to manage the work program for maintenance forces, to schedule and report daily work activities, and to analyze the maintenance business processes. The Quality Assurance System measures conditions in nine different maintenance categories to allow continuous assessment of maintenance performance and conditions. Lessons Learned: Engagement and Evolution Utah officials say that their experience taught them lessons in how to achieve organizational acceptance of Asset Management. As already mentioned, the top leadership was engaged, clear messages of change were articulated and Asset Management was given emphasis until it became routine. An additional requirement that the Utah officials said they recognized over time was the need to fully engage mid-level region staff. These staff members were being exposed to new management philosophies, new pavement management tactics, new types of computerized pavement management reports and new demands to provide consistent data. Each of these new concepts required consistent, on-going training in order to achieve widespread understanding and acceptance of Asset Management. The Asset Management staff faced skepticism in the regions because of misunderstandings about the project-level outputs of the early phases of the pavement management model. As with most pavement management models, the output data, forecasts and budgets are more accurate over a long period of time and across an entire network. The accuracy of any one forecast for a particular pavement section in a particular year is much less valid. However, the pavement management reports were being generated and provided to the regions. Region personnel would find discrepancies between the pavement conditions they knew to exist in the field with what the conditions reported for individual sections by the pavement management model. Such discrepancies led to complaints that the pavement management system, and Asset Management, were “black boxes” that were unclear and unreliable. The Asset Management staff went to every region to meet with the staff and to analyze the problems with the data, the system outputs and with the region personnel’s understanding of the pavement management process. The Asset Management staff said they found that many of the data inputs were incorrect, therefore the model outputs were incorrect. Because the pavement management system had not been extensively relied upon before for pavement funding and selection decisions, it was not maintained adequately. The estimates of how much treatments actually cost were outdated, or imprecise. The pavement condition assessments for the model were manually collected, and wide variability in the rating of pavements was found. They reported that one section of pavement over four years was rated as a 70, 100, 70 and 50, even though it had experienced no treatments over that time. They also realized that many staff did not understand the specific section treatment recommendations which come from a financially constrained optimization pavement model. Under one funding scenario, certain treatments of certain pavement sections were recommended. Under another funding scenario, other treatments were recommended. The logic behind the differing model recommendations was not fully understood, and therefore the entire process was viewed as unreliable, the Asset Management staff report. At that time, the regions also were responsible for collecting some of the pavement distress data. Visual inspections were conducted of the first tenth of a mile of sample sections. The Asset Management staff said they realized that some region personnel did not understand the rating process, they performed it inconsistently and they did not rely upon the data for their own decision process. “I know what was said,” reported one Asset Management staff. “ ‘Central Office wants this data and I don’t know why but let’s send them some data.’ That was the central problem, they did not see any benefit from this. It was only work.” The Utah leadership realized that the journey of continuous improvement required additional training, as well as improved data processes. They changed from manual pavement condition assessment to automated assessment in order to get more frequent, comprehensive and consistent pavement condition data. Now, with their automated pavement assessment process they can get condition on a full mile of every section, as opposed to the one-tenth of a mile they could produce manually. Also, the data is more consistent, and frequent. The entire highway network can be assessed in two years. They analyze the interstate system in both directions annually. The Utah experience also shows the importance of explaining what management systems can do well, and what they can’t. The use of a pavement management system was important to setting overall system goals and budgets. However, it became apparent that the short-comings of a pavement management system at the project level needed to be clarified. The pavement management system’s project-level recommendations were not consistent with what region personnel were seeing in the field, leading to skepticism about the validity of the management systems, say the Utah Asset Management staff. “The regions looked at the output and said this isn’t right,” said one Asset Management official. The evolution of Utah’s Asset Management process illustrates the need to raise the understanding of asset management, and its components such as pavement management, across a broad spectrum of departmental staff. Most departments are decentralized in many aspects. The decentralization provides the benefit of keeping decisions rooted in the reality of what is actually happening in the field. Decentralization also increases the complexity of the training process, particularly when management systems are deployed as a new tool in the decision-making process. The department has evolved and refined important aspects of its pavement management, and pavement project selection processes over time to improve its decentralized process. It has developed several institutional processes, groups and reports in order to perpetuate a continuous evaluation of how well the pavement process is working. In the decentralized Utah structure, each region has its own pavement management engineer who does pavement designs for the region. However, the region pavement engineer and the materials engineers participate in a statewide pavement team. This participation provides key region pavement decision makers access to information about statewide practices. The participation not only serves to disseminate statewide information to the regions, it allows peer exchange between the regions, as well as region feedback to central office. The intention of the statewide participation is to generate consistency in decision making, to solicit broad input into pavement issues and to provide feedback between field and central office decision makers. The continuous interaction provides information which is used to continually refine data elements, such as true project costs, the actual pavement conditions and accurate information about pavement performance compared to forecasted performance. This feedback continually improves the overall decision making process. In addition to the periodic group meetings between region and central office personnel, the central office staff travel to each region annually for field visits. This allows the central office staff to review conditions on the roadway with the regions, and to evaluate the correlation between the reported and forecast conditions, and actual conditions in the field. These formal and informal exchanges are intended to create a broad consensus and understanding of the pavement management process. The central office asset management personnel said such visits have provided valuable insight and quality-control information. From such interactions and visits they determined that their model was providing poor forecasts of cracking. What the model showed to be good performing sections were actually found to be suffering extensive cracking when viewed in the field The Utah asset management officials said while communication is critical to instilling asset management in an organization, the communication needs to be two way. The central office experts need to communicate about the powerful analytic and decision-making potential of the pavement management system, and its data bases. At the same time, the central office personnel can learn a great deal from the day-to-day field experience of the region personnel. The continuous and open communication between central office and field personnel is an important component of continually improving the pavement management process, they noted. Like with many other departments, the Utah asset management approach to optimization is a hybrid of both computational forecasts from the pavement management system combined with the professional engineering judgment of the staff in the field. The central office provides pavement program scenarios to each region illustrating an optimized program of projects generated from the statewide model. The regions review those lists of suggested projects but make the actual pavement selections. The consideration of both the model’s optimized list of projects combined with the field observations and experience of the region allows the insights of both the management system and the field personnel to be captured in the final pavement program. Once the regions have identified a six year program of projects, the central office staff gives it a high-level review to ensure the program is consistent with the statewide goals. Strategies for Adaption The Utah officials say their ever-improving pavement management process has allowed them to adapt to two critical changes. First, as they experience turnover in region personnel, the existing pavement management process provides significant analytic and institutional support to the new personnel. They find that the new personnel are anxious for insights into past pavement performance, into their range of investment options and about the various program scenarios they could pursue. The central office officials say the pavement management process provides proven templates for new region personnel to follow as they master their new positions. To further ensure consistency in its approach, the department created a Pavement Panel to help new region personnel select pavements. It consists of membership from the regions and central office. It acts like a peer review panel for the new personnel’s program and project decisions. Suggested pavement treatments are explained and put up for a vote by email among the 10 member panel. If at least 7 panelists agree with the selection, it is approved. If fewer than 7 approve, than the individual recommendation is reviewed by Central Office. The process serves to standardize the approach to treatments across the department, and to ensure that extra elements which drive up costs are not included. Also, the pavement management process has provided a rational and structured process for the department to use as it copes with the significantly higher material costs of recent years. Although its pavement program has not been reduced in terms of its overall budget, the purchasing power of that pavement budget has fallen by nearly half in recent years. The department was able to make rational – albeit difficult – tradeoffs in its pavement investment approach based upon its improved analytical capabilities. The department classified its system into Level I routes which include the Interstate Highways and generally the arterial network. The collectors and other minor routes are categorized as Level 2 routes. Pavement treatment priority will go to the Level I routes which carry about 70 percent of the state’s traffic volumes. Those routes will be actively managed and will receive the large majority of the department’s pavement budget. The low-volume Level 2 routes will receive primarily low-cost treatments such as chip seals. In general, the Level 2 routes have average daily traffic of less than 2,000 vehicles, with fewer than 500 trucks. The asset management staff said the difficult process of prioritizing the pavement program under such tight fiscal constraints has brought more region personnel to seek assistance from the pavement management system. The pavement management system has provided an invaluable assistance in providing various scenarios by which the regions can analyze which mix of projects can optimize their system with their limited resources. While the department has relied on its pavement management system for more than a decade for functions such as forecasting overall investment needs, the system now is playing a more critical analytic role because of the intensity of the pavement preservation shortfall. The Utah DOT’s pavement management system and its logical, systematic approach to managing the network helped the department explain to the Utah Transportation Commission the department’s approach to the dramatic increase in prices experienced between 2005 and 2008. Using the analytics from the pavement management system, the staff explained to the commission the department’s intention to pursue a lower cost programmatic approach to sustaining pavement conditions. The logical and systematic process appealed to the Commission, which allowed the department to cope with rising costs by accepting a lower level of condition on the low-volume Level 2 routes. Toward Comprehensive Asset Management Although the examples discussed thus far relate to pavements, the Utah DOT has evolved on a parallel track to a more comprehensive Asset Management process which includes not only pavements but bridges, maintenance items and safety elements. Data from systems affecting all the highway attributes are collected in a central asset management data based purchased from one of the national Asset Management system vendors. The pavement data includes friction data taken statewide on a two-year cycle. One lane was tested each direction, except on divided highways where both directions were tested. One test section was performed on each mile. The data base also was populated with falling weight deflection data taken system wide, with one reading taken per mile. This data was provided for project-level design inputs. A profiler van also collected International Roughness Index data, as well as rutting and concrete faulting data. Again, the data was collected annually on one directional lane, except for the divided highways which had both directions measured. For many years, cracking data was collected by the regions annually. Data was collected for onetenth of a mile sections It was the variability of the manually produced cracking data that led to concerns about the accuracy, frequency and consistency of the data. The department has since moved to an automated distress collection process. It allows data to be collected statewide, not just on tenth-mile long sections. All the pavement data – skid, rutting, IRI, cracking and FWD– is populated into the central asset management database. The department relies on Pontis for its bridge data system. Bridge inspections are conducted every two years, except for structurally deficient bridges which are inspected annually. Likewise, safety data is populated in a Safety Management System, which produces a Safety Index for each mile of roadway. The data includes information regarding crash severity and crash type by location. The system calculates a numeric ranking from the Safety Index for every roadway section. The sections which are elevated in their safety index are considered for additional treatments as part of the other programs including the pavement, bridge and maintenance programs. The maintenance data comes from the Operations Management System (OMS). It stores an extensive amount of data for each section including: Ø Maintenance section delineation; Ø Station boundaries; Ø A snow plan for each section; Ø Shoulder dimensions and profile; Ø Drainage and culvert information; Ø Guardrail and barrier inventory; Ø Sign inventory; Ø Noise walls; Ø Pavement markings; Ø Vegetation management areas; Ø Mowable area; Ø Litter pickup area; Ø Cattle guards and tunnels. The Operations Management System manages the budget, the work programs for maintenance crews, it helps them schedule and it helps measure their effectiveness. The effectiveness is measured by evaluating actual conditions against the maintenance targets, as well as calculating maintenance function costs. The OMS is used for planning, organizing and directing resources. The maintenance functions interact with Asset Management in several ways. Departmental officials say the philosophy of preventive maintenance is deeply ingrained in the organization and its workforce. They believe front-line maintenance workers understand that well maintained roads cost less, and last longer, which complements the Asset Management approach. The integration of pavement condition data, safety data and maintenance data all can influence maintenance decisions. Where the central Asset Management data system indicates there are poor pavement conditions, poor skid numbers or an elevated safety index, the maintenance crews consider what operations they can perform to improve those sections. If the maintenance crews perform a chip seal or other significant treatment, that treatment is captured through the central data base and fed into the pavement system. In these different ways, the activities of the maintenance forces can be influenced by asset condition levels, and conversely, the activities of the maintenance forces can measurably improve asset condition and performance. Not only do the Utah DOT management systems plan and record activities at the front-line maintenance level and the region project-selection level but they also provide comprehensive 20-year plans for the department. Both the bridge management system and the pavement management systems produce 20 year plans, both by region and statewide. They also suggest the treatment by pavement section and structure, treatment cost, overall budget needs and the commensurate level of condition that would be achieved by the forecasted program. The forecasts provide assurance that the asset management program being pursued by the department will achieve its long-term goals of asset sustainability. The department does not use the 20 year forecasts for project selection, but rather for planning purposes and to assess whether overall funding levels are likely to achieve the desired system conditions. The overall result of the various systems and processes is to produce for the Utah DOT a comprehensive asset management process that considers pavements, bridges, and maintenance features and links them to safety considerations. Utah DOT Case Study _____________________________________________________________ Utah’s Asset Management Beginnings In preparation for the 2002 Winter Olympics, the Utah DOT completed a $1.5 billion design/build reconstruction and expansion of I-15 through the heart of Salt Lake City. As the department’s leaders readied the modern facility for its opening, they also pondered their long-term approach to ensuring it remains in sound condition throughout its service life. They describe having an epiphany in which it occurred to them that they should undertake the same comprehensive effort to maintain I-15 as they put into building it. Department Director John Njord led the top management through a three-day workshop and self-evaluation of the department’s Asset Management practices. One of the participants described it as a painful process. It was painful both in the length and detail of the analysis as well as in terms of the team recognizing that it lacked a comprehensive Asset Management approach. From the process, however, the important seeds were sown to create a comprehensive Asset Management program. First, the top-down involvement of the Utah DOT leadership served an important “change management” function. In change management, it is important to provide institutional legitimacy to a change, which the director’s involvement provided. Second, the effort was followed by monthly meetings until the Asset Management process was well under way. Those meetings helped to ensure that momentum was gained by the fledgling effort. Three, the workshop and subsequent efforts served as clear points of change for the department. They represented that one era was ending and that a new era of Asset Management was beginning. Such demarcation is an important feature of changing behavior in a large organization by clearly communicating that the organization has embraced a new direction. Without such emphatic “pivoting” of the organization, bureaucratic inertia can stifle change. Finally, the UDOT leadership insisted that Asset Management become “institutionalized” by creating the policies, manuals, organizational structures and data systems to provide common definitions, common understanding, and a common approach to Asset Management throughout the department. Although the Utah leadership may not have described their efforts at the time as conscious “Change Management,” the actions they took with their top-level involvement and engagement were typical of classic “Change Management” strategies. Those actions appear to encapsulate the type of engagement necessary by Asset Management advocates to ingrain the practice in their organization. Performance Management Linkage Also in the early 2000s, the Utah DOT was embracing performance metrics and Performance Management, say its officials who were involved at the time. Like so many other officials in other agencies, they quickly recognized the linkage between Asset Management and producing performance metrics for the transportation system. They began by setting goals for what level of pavement and bridge conditions they wanted to sustain for the highway system. The emphasis on both achieving and then sustaining those conditions over time with limited resources strongly influenced their recognition of the benefits of performance management. Among their initial targets were to have 90 percent of the Interstate System, 70 percent of the arterial system and 50 percent of the collector system meeting smoothness standards. Once steps are taken to sustain those goals, both Asset Management and the regular monitoring of performance inherent performance management appear to be self-evidently logical to the organization, Utah officials said. Today, the department produces both extensive Asset Management data but it also produces an annual “Strategic Direction and Performance Measures” report. This report is like an annual corporate report in that it describes major issues facing the department and describes the agency’s performance in addressing these issues. Within the larger set of performance metrics that it reports in the Strategic Direction document are high- level performance metrics on how it is managing its highway assets. Creating an Asset Management Structure Over its seven year journey, the Utah DOT created both organizational structures and data systems to support its Asset Management approach. The two parallel efforts were closely linked and complementary, and they illustrate the duality of successful Asset Management efforts. Successful Asset Management organizations have not only sound data systems to provide decision makers good information but they have organizational processes which ensure that the logic of Asset Management is followed during the decision making process. To develop both the data systems and business processes, the Utah DOT pursued the following comprehensive series of efforts. • It created a Transportation Asset Management Committee (TRANSMAT). This consists of the UDOT senior leaders, members of the Asset Management Team and several Asset Management Groups. TRANSMAT is responsible for overseeing and approving all of the Asset Management efforts within the department. It ensures that “people, plans and processes” are in place to meet the asset management goals. • It established an Asset Management Team under a Director for Asset Management. Within the Asset Management Team is an Asset Management Engineer’s position. • It developed an Asset Management Strategic Plan. This outlined the goals and objectives for the continuous, incremental improvement of the Asset Management process. • An Asset Management Implementation Plan was developed. This plan was intended to outline and track the steps necessary to achieve the objectives of the Strategic Plan. • Reorganization to achieve the Asset Management objectives was completed. The pavement asset group section was reorganized to align with the new strategies and tactics. • An Asset Management Manual was developed. It explains to department personnel how to implement the asset management practices within the department. • A UDOT Asset Management Strategic Planning model was developed. This served as the guide to developing project recommendations within the UDOT Long Range Plan. It relied upon forecasting long-term needs and optimizing investment options between programs to achieve the highest system conditions possible with available resources. • An asset management data base was developed. It was created to facilitate optimizing both within various asset categories but also to allow for the first step toward cross-asset optimization and tradeoff analysis. • The pavement and bridge management systems were enhanced. • Development of an Asset Management Strategic Analysis was completed. This enhancement to the computerized Asset Management System allowed “silo” or “stove pipe” analysis of five different classes of assets. These were pavements, structures, safety, maintenance and mobility. Initial example runs of cross-asset optimization analyses were conducted for demonstration purposes and to allow further investigation by the DOT. • An Operations Management System (OMS) and a complementary Maintenance Management Quality Assurance System were created. The OMS was developed to manage the work program for maintenance forces, to schedule and report daily work activities, and to analyze the maintenance business processes. The Quality Assurance System measures conditions in nine different maintenance categories to allow continuous assessment of maintenance performance and conditions. Lessons Learned: Engagement and Evolution Utah officials say that their experience taught them lessons in how to achieve organizational acceptance of Asset Management. As already mentioned, the top leadership was engaged, clear messages of change were articulated and Asset Management was given emphasis until it became routine. An additional requirement that the Utah officials said they recognized over time was the need to fully engage mid-level region staff. These staff members were being exposed to new management philosophies, new pavement management tactics, new types of computerized pavement management reports and new demands to provide consistent data. Each of these new concepts required consistent, on-going training in order to achieve widespread understanding and acceptance of Asset Management. The Asset Management staff faced skepticism in the regions because of misunderstandings about the project-level outputs of the early phases of the pavement management model. As with most pavement management models, the output data, forecasts and budgets are more accurate over a long period of time and across an entire network. The accuracy of any one forecast for a particular pavement section in a particular year is much less valid. However, the pavement management reports were being generated and provided to the regions. Region personnel would find discrepancies between the pavement conditions they knew to exist in the field with what the conditions reported for individual sections by the pavement management model. Such discrepancies led to complaints that the pavement management system, and Asset Management, were “black boxes” that were unclear and unreliable. The Asset Management staff went to every region to meet with the staff and to analyze the problems with the data, the system outputs and with the region personnel’s understanding of the pavement management process. The Asset Management staff said they found that many of the data inputs were incorrect, therefore the model outputs were incorrect. Because the pavement management system had not been extensively relied upon before for pavement funding and selection decisions, it was not maintained adequately. The estimates of how much treatments actually cost were outdated, or imprecise. The pavement condition assessments for the model were manually collected, and wide variability in the rating of pavements was found. They reported that one section of pavement over four years was rated as a 70, 100, 70 and 50, even though it had experienced no treatments over that time. They also realized that many staff did not understand the specific section treatment recommendations which come from a financially constrained optimization pavement model. Under one funding scenario, certain treatments of certain pavement sections were recommended. Under another funding scenario, other treatments were recommended. The logic behind the differing model recommendations was not fully understood, and therefore the entire process was viewed as unreliable, the Asset Management staff report. At that time, the regions also were responsible for collecting some of the pavement distress data. Visual inspections were conducted of the first tenth of a mile of sample sections. The Asset Management staff said they realized that some region personnel did not understand the rating process, they performed it inconsistently and they did not rely upon the data for their own decision process. “I know what was said,” reported one Asset Management staff. “ ‘Central Office wants this data and I don’t know why but let’s send them some data.’ That was the central problem, they did not see any benefit from this. It was only work.” The Utah leadership realized that the journey of continuous improvement required additional training, as well as improved data processes. They changed from manual pavement condition assessment to automated assessment in order to get more frequent, comprehensive and consistent pavement condition data. Now, with their automated pavement assessment process they can get condition on a full mile of every section, as opposed to the one-tenth of a mile they could produce manually. Also, the data is more consistent, and frequent. The entire highway network can be assessed in two years. They analyze the interstate system in both directions annually. The Utah experience also shows the importance of explaining what management systems can do well, and what they can’t. The use of a pavement management system was important to setting overall system goals and budgets. However, it became apparent that the short-comings of a pavement management system at the project level needed to be clarified. The pavement management system’s project-level recommendations were not consistent with what region personnel were seeing in the field, leading to skepticism about the validity of the management systems, say the Utah Asset Management staff. “The regions looked at the output and said this isn’t right,” said one Asset Management official. The evolution of Utah’s Asset Management process illustrates the need to raise the understanding of asset management, and its components such as pavement management, across a broad spectrum of departmental staff. Most departments are decentralized in many aspects. The decentralization provides the benefit of keeping decisions rooted in the reality of what is actually happening in the field. Decentralization also increases the complexity of the training process, particularly when management systems are deployed as a new tool in the decision-making process. The department has evolved and refined important aspects of its pavement management, and pavement project selection processes over time to improve its decentralized process. It has developed several institutional processes, groups and reports in order to perpetuate a continuous evaluation of how well the pavement process is working. In the decentralized Utah structure, each region has its own pavement management engineer who does pavement designs for the region. However, the region pavement engineer and the materials engineers participate in a statewide pavement team. This participation provides key region pavement decision makers access to information about statewide practices. The participation not only serves to disseminate statewide information to the regions, it allows peer exchange between the regions, as well as region feedback to central office. The intention of the statewide participation is to generate consistency in decision making, to solicit broad input into pavement issues and to provide feedback between field and central office decision makers. The continuous interaction provides information which is used to continually refine data elements, such as true project costs, the actual pavement conditions and accurate information about pavement performance compared to forecasted performance. This feedback continually improves the overall decision making process. In addition to the periodic group meetings between region and central office personnel, the central office staff travel to each region annually for field visits. This allows the central office staff to review conditions on the roadway with the regions, and to evaluate the correlation between the reported and forecast conditions, and actual conditions in the field. These formal and informal exchanges are intended to create a broad consensus and understanding of the pavement management process. The central office asset management personnel said such visits have provided valuable insight and quality-control information. From such interactions and visits they determined that their model was providing poor forecasts of cracking. What the model showed to be good performing sections were actually found to be suffering extensive cracking when viewed in the field The Utah asset management officials said while communication is critical to instilling asset management in an organization, the communication needs to be two way. The central office experts need to communicate about the powerful analytic and decision-making potential of the pavement management system, and its data bases. At the same time, the central office personnel can learn a great deal from the day-to-day field experience of the region personnel. The continuous and open communication between central office and field personnel is an important component of continually improving the pavement management process, they noted. Like with many other departments, the Utah asset management approach to optimization is a hybrid of both computational forecasts from the pavement management system combined with the professional engineering judgment of the staff in the field. The central office provides pavement program scenarios to each region illustrating an optimized program of projects generated from the statewide model. The regions review those lists of suggested projects but make the actual pavement selections. The consideration of both the model’s optimized list of projects combined with the field observations and experience of the region allows the insights of both the management system and the field personnel to be captured in the final pavement program. Once the regions have identified a six year program of projects, the central office staff gives it a high-level review to ensure the program is consistent with the statewide goals. Strategies for Adaption The Utah officials say their ever-improving pavement management process has allowed them to adapt to two critical changes. First, as they experience turnover in region personnel, the existing pavement management process provides significant analytic and institutional support to the new personnel. They find that the new personnel are anxious for insights into past pavement performance, into their range of investment options and about the various program scenarios they could pursue. The central office officials say the pavement management process provides proven templates for new region personnel to follow as they master their new positions. To further ensure consistency in its approach, the department created a Pavement Panel to help new region personnel select pavements. It consists of membership from the regions and central office. It acts like a peer review panel for the new personnel’s program and project decisions. Suggested pavement treatments are explained and put up for a vote by email among the 10 member panel. If at least 7 panelists agree with the selection, it is approved. If fewer than 7 approve, than the individual recommendation is reviewed by Central Office. The process serves to standardize the approach to treatments across the department, and to ensure that extra elements which drive up costs are not included. Also, the pavement management process has provided a rational and structured process for the department to use as it copes with the significantly higher material costs of recent years. Although its pavement program has not been reduced in terms of its overall budget, the purchasing power of that pavement budget has fallen by nearly half in recent years. The department was able to make rational – albeit difficult – tradeoffs in its pavement investment approach based upon its improved analytical capabilities. The department classified its system into Level I routes which include the Interstate Highways and generally the arterial network. The collectors and other minor routes are categorized as Level 2 routes. Pavement treatment priority will go to the Level I routes which carry about 70 percent of the state’s traffic volumes. Those routes will be actively managed and will receive the large majority of the department’s pavement budget. The low-volume Level 2 routes will receive primarily low-cost treatments such as chip seals. In general, the Level 2 routes have average daily traffic of less than 2,000 vehicles, with fewer than 500 trucks. The asset management staff said the difficult process of prioritizing the pavement program under such tight fiscal constraints has brought more region personnel to seek assistance from the pavement management system. The pavement management system has provided an invaluable assistance in providing various scenarios by which the regions can analyze which mix of projects can optimize their system with their limited resources. While the department has relied on its pavement management system for more than a decade for functions such as forecasting overall investment needs, the system now is playing a more critical analytic role because of the intensity of the pavement preservation shortfall. The Utah DOT’s pavement management system and its logical, systematic approach to managing the network helped the department explain to the Utah Transportation Commission the department’s approach to the dramatic increase in prices experienced between 2005 and 2008. Using the analytics from the pavement management system, the staff explained to the commission the department’s intention to pursue a lower cost programmatic approach to sustaining pavement conditions. The logical and systematic process appealed to the Commission, which allowed the department to cope with rising costs by accepting a lower level of condition on the low-volume Level 2 routes. Toward Comprehensive Asset Management Although the examples discussed thus far relate to pavements, the Utah DOT has evolved on a parallel track to a more comprehensive Asset Management process which includes not only pavements but bridges, maintenance items and safety elements. Data from systems affecting all the highway attributes are collected in a central asset management data based purchased from one of the national Asset Management system vendors. The pavement data includes friction data taken statewide on a two-year cycle. One lane was tested each direction, except on divided highways where both directions were tested. One test section was performed on each mile. The data base also was populated with falling weight deflection data taken system wide, with one reading taken per mile. This data was provided for project-level design inputs. A profiler van also collected International Roughness Index data, as well as rutting and concrete faulting data. Again, the data was collected annually on one directional lane, except for the divided highways which had both directions measured. For many years, cracking data was collected by the regions annually. Data was collected for onetenth of a mile sections It was the variability of the manually produced cracking data that led to concerns about the accuracy, frequency and consistency of the data. The department has since moved to an automated distress collection process. It allows data to be collected statewide, not just on tenth-mile long sections. All the pavement data – skid, rutting, IRI, cracking and FWD– is populated into the central asset management database. The department relies on Pontis for its bridge data system. Bridge inspections are conducted every two years, except for structurally deficient bridges which are inspected annually. Likewise, safety data is populated in a Safety Management System, which produces a Safety Index for each mile of roadway. The data includes information regarding crash severity and crash type by location. The system calculates a numeric ranking from the Safety Index for every roadway section. The sections which are elevated in their safety index are considered for additional treatments as part of the other programs including the pavement, bridge and maintenance programs. The maintenance data comes from the Operations Management System (OMS). It stores an extensive amount of data for each section including: Ø Maintenance section delineation; Ø Station boundaries; Ø A snow plan for each section; Ø Shoulder dimensions and profile; Ø Drainage and culvert information; Ø Guardrail and barrier inventory; Ø Sign inventory; Ø Noise walls; Ø Pavement markings; Ø Vegetation management areas; Ø Mowable area; Ø Litter pickup area; Ø Cattle guards and tunnels. The Operations Management System manages the budget, the work programs for maintenance crews, it helps them schedule and it helps measure their effectiveness. The effectiveness is measured by evaluating actual conditions against the maintenance targets, as well as calculating maintenance function costs. The OMS is used for planning, organizing and directing resources. The maintenance functions interact with Asset Management in several ways. Departmental officials say the philosophy of preventive maintenance is deeply ingrained in the organization and its workforce. They believe front-line maintenance workers understand that well maintained roads cost less, and last longer, which complements the Asset Management approach. The integration of pavement condition data, safety data and maintenance data all can influence maintenance decisions. Where the central Asset Management data system indicates there are poor pavement conditions, poor skid numbers or an elevated safety index, the maintenance crews consider what operations they can perform to improve those sections. If the maintenance crews perform a chip seal or other significant treatment, that treatment is captured through the central data base and fed into the pavement system. In these different ways, the activities of the maintenance forces can be influenced by asset condition levels, and conversely, the activities of the maintenance forces can measurably improve asset condition and performance. Not only do the Utah DOT management systems plan and record activities at the front-line maintenance level and the region project-selection level but they also provide comprehensive 20-year plans for the department. Both the bridge management system and the pavement management systems produce 20 year plans, both by region and statewide. They also suggest the treatment by pavement section and structure, treatment cost, overall budget needs and the commensurate level of condition that would be achieved by the forecasted program. The forecasts provide assurance that the asset management program being pursued by the department will achieve its long-term goals of asset sustainability. The department does not use the 20 year forecasts for project selection, but rather for planning purposes and to assess whether overall funding levels are likely to achieve the desired system conditions. The overall result of the various systems and processes is to produce for the Utah DOT a comprehensive asset management process that considers pavements, bridges, and maintenance features and links them to safety considerations. Utah DOT Case Study _____________________________________________________________ Utah’s Asset Management Beginnings In preparation for the 2002 Winter Olympics, the Utah DOT completed a $1.5 billion design/build reconstruction and expansion of I-15 through the heart of Salt Lake City. As the department’s leaders readied the modern facility for its opening, they also pondered their long-term approach to ensuring it remains in sound condition throughout its service life. They describe having an epiphany in which it occurred to them that they should undertake the same comprehensive effort to maintain I-15 as they put into building it. Department Director John Njord led the top management through a three-day workshop and self-evaluation of the department’s Asset Management practices. One of the participants described it as a painful process. It was painful both in the length and detail of the analysis as well as in terms of the team recognizing that it lacked a comprehensive Asset Management approach. From the process, however, the important seeds were sown to create a comprehensive Asset Management program. First, the top-down involvement of the Utah DOT leadership served an important “change management” function. In change management, it is important to provide institutional legitimacy to a change, which the director’s involvement provided. Second, the effort was followed by monthly meetings until the Asset Management process was well under way. Those meetings helped to ensure that momentum was gained by the fledgling effort. Three, the workshop and subsequent efforts served as clear points of change for the department. They represented that one era was ending and that a new era of Asset Management was beginning. Such demarcation is an important feature of changing behavior in a large organization by clearly communicating that the organization has embraced a new direction. Without such emphatic “pivoting” of the organization, bureaucratic inertia can stifle change. Finally, the UDOT leadership insisted that Asset Management become “institutionalized” by creating the policies, manuals, organizational structures and data systems to provide common definitions, common understanding, and a common approach to Asset Management throughout the department. Although the Utah leadership may not have described their efforts at the time as conscious “Change Management,” the actions they took with their top-level involvement and engagement were typical of classic “Change Management” strategies. Those actions appear to encapsulate the type of engagement necessary by Asset Management advocates to ingrain the practice in their organization. Performance Management Linkage Also in the early 2000s, the Utah DOT was embracing performance metrics and Performance Management, say its officials who were involved at the time. Like so many other officials in other agencies, they quickly recognized the linkage between Asset Management and producing performance metrics for the transportation system. They began by setting goals for what level of pavement and bridge conditions they wanted to sustain for the highway system. The emphasis on both achieving and then sustaining those conditions over time with limited resources strongly influenced their recognition of the benefits of performance management. Among their initial targets were to have 90 percent of the Interstate System, 70 percent of the arterial system and 50 percent of the collector system meeting smoothness standards. Once steps are taken to sustain those goals, both Asset Management and the regular monitoring of performance inherent performance management appear to be self-evidently logical to the organization, Utah officials said. Today, the department produces both extensive Asset Management data but it also produces an annual “Strategic Direction and Performance Measures” report. This report is like an annual corporate report in that it describes major issues facing the department and describes the agency’s performance in addressing these issues. Within the larger set of performance metrics that it reports in the Strategic Direction document are high- level performance metrics on how it is managing its highway assets. Creating an Asset Management Structure Over its seven year journey, the Utah DOT created both organizational structures and data systems to support its Asset Management approach. The two parallel efforts were closely linked and complementary, and they illustrate the duality of successful Asset Management efforts. Successful Asset Management organizations have not only sound data systems to provide decision makers good information but they have organizational processes which ensure that the logic of Asset Management is followed during the decision making process. To develop both the data systems and business processes, the Utah DOT pursued the following comprehensive series of efforts. • It created a Transportation Asset Management Committee (TRANSMAT). This consists of the UDOT senior leaders, members of the Asset Management Team and several Asset Management Groups. TRANSMAT is responsible for overseeing and approving all of the Asset Management efforts within the department. It ensures that “people, plans and processes” are in place to meet the asset management goals. • It established an Asset Management Team under a Director for Asset Management. Within the Asset Management Team is an Asset Management Engineer’s position. • It developed an Asset Management Strategic Plan. This outlined the goals and objectives for the continuous, incremental improvement of the Asset Management process. • An Asset Management Implementation Plan was developed. This plan was intended to outline and track the steps necessary to achieve the objectives of the Strategic Plan. • Reorganization to achieve the Asset Management objectives was completed. The pavement asset group section was reorganized to align with the new strategies and tactics. • An Asset Management Manual was developed. It explains to department personnel how to implement the asset management practices within the department. • A UDOT Asset Management Strategic Planning model was developed. This served as the guide to developing project recommendations within the UDOT Long Range Plan. It relied upon forecasting long-term needs and optimizing investment options between programs to achieve the highest system conditions possible with available resources. • An asset management data base was developed. It was created to facilitate optimizing both within various asset categories but also to allow for the first step toward cross-asset optimization and tradeoff analysis. • The pavement and bridge management systems were enhanced. • Development of an Asset Management Strategic Analysis was completed. This enhancement to the computerized Asset Management System allowed “silo” or “stove pipe” analysis of five different classes of assets. These were pavements, structures, safety, maintenance and mobility. Initial example runs of cross-asset optimization analyses were conducted for demonstration purposes and to allow further investigation by the DOT. • An Operations Management System (OMS) and a complementary Maintenance Management Quality Assurance System were created. The OMS was developed to manage the work program for maintenance forces, to schedule and report daily work activities, and to analyze the maintenance business processes. The Quality Assurance System measures conditions in nine different maintenance categories to allow continuous assessment of maintenance performance and conditions. Lessons Learned: Engagement and Evolution Utah officials say that their experience taught them lessons in how to achieve organizational acceptance of Asset Management. As already mentioned, the top leadership was engaged, clear messages of change were articulated and Asset Management was given emphasis until it became routine. An additional requirement that the Utah officials said they recognized over time was the need to fully engage mid-level region staff. These staff members were being exposed to new management philosophies, new pavement management tactics, new types of computerized pavement management reports and new demands to provide consistent data. Each of these new concepts required consistent, on-going training in order to achieve widespread understanding and acceptance of Asset Management. The Asset Management staff faced skepticism in the regions because of misunderstandings about the project-level outputs of the early phases of the pavement management model. As with most pavement management models, the output data, forecasts and budgets are more accurate over a long period of time and across an entire network. The accuracy of any one forecast for a particular pavement section in a particular year is much less valid. However, the pavement management reports were being generated and provided to the regions. Region personnel would find discrepancies between the pavement conditions they knew to exist in the field with what the conditions reported for individual sections by the pavement management model. Such discrepancies led to complaints that the pavement management system, and Asset Management, were “black boxes” that were unclear and unreliable. The Asset Management staff went to every region to meet with the staff and to analyze the problems with the data, the system outputs and with the region personnel’s understanding of the pavement management process. The Asset Management staff said they found that many of the data inputs were incorrect, therefore the model outputs were incorrect. Because the pavement management system had not been extensively relied upon before for pavement funding and selection decisions, it was not maintained adequately. The estimates of how much treatments actually cost were outdated, or imprecise. The pavement condition assessments for the model were manually collected, and wide variability in the rating of pavements was found. They reported that one section of pavement over four years was rated as a 70, 100, 70 and 50, even though it had experienced no treatments over that time. They also realized that many staff did not understand the specific section treatment recommendations which come from a financially constrained optimization pavement model. Under one funding scenario, certain treatments of certain pavement sections were recommended. Under another funding scenario, other treatments were recommended. The logic behind the differing model recommendations was not fully understood, and therefore the entire process was viewed as unreliable, the Asset Management staff report. At that time, the regions also were responsible for collecting some of the pavement distress data. Visual inspections were conducted of the first tenth of a mile of sample sections. The Asset Management staff said they realized that some region personnel did not understand the rating process, they performed it inconsistently and they did not rely upon the data for their own decision process. “I know what was said,” reported one Asset Management staff. “ ‘Central Office wants this data and I don’t know why but let’s send them some data.’ That was the central problem, they did not see any benefit from this. It was only work.” The Utah leadership realized that the journey of continuous improvement required additional training, as well as improved data processes. They changed from manual pavement condition assessment to automated assessment in order to get more frequent, comprehensive and consistent pavement condition data. Now, with their automated pavement assessment process they can get condition on a full mile of every section, as opposed to the one-tenth of a mile they could produce manually. Also, the data is more consistent, and frequent. The entire highway network can be assessed in two years. They analyze the interstate system in both directions annually. The Utah experience also shows the importance of explaining what management systems can do well, and what they can’t. The use of a pavement management system was important to setting overall system goals and budgets. However, it became apparent that the short-comings of a pavement management system at the project level needed to be clarified. The pavement management system’s project-level recommendations were not consistent with what region personnel were seeing in the field, leading to skepticism about the validity of the management systems, say the Utah Asset Management staff. “The regions looked at the output and said this isn’t right,” said one Asset Management official. The evolution of Utah’s Asset Management process illustrates the need to raise the understanding of asset management, and its components such as pavement management, across a broad spectrum of departmental staff. Most departments are decentralized in many aspects. The decentralization provides the benefit of keeping decisions rooted in the reality of what is actually happening in the field. Decentralization also increases the complexity of the training process, particularly when management systems are deployed as a new tool in the decision-making process. The department has evolved and refined important aspects of its pavement management, and pavement project selection processes over time to improve its decentralized process. It has developed several institutional processes, groups and reports in order to perpetuate a continuous evaluation of how well the pavement process is working. In the decentralized Utah structure, each region has its own pavement management engineer who does pavement designs for the region. However, the region pavement engineer and the materials engineers participate in a statewide pavement team. This participation provides key region pavement decision makers access to information about statewide practices. The participation not only serves to disseminate statewide information to the regions, it allows peer exchange between the regions, as well as region feedback to central office. The intention of the statewide participation is to generate consistency in decision making, to solicit broad input into pavement issues and to provide feedback between field and central office decision makers. The continuous interaction provides information which is used to continually refine data elements, such as true project costs, the actual pavement conditions and accurate information about pavement performance compared to forecasted performance. This feedback continually improves the overall decision making process. In addition to the periodic group meetings between region and central office personnel, the central office staff travel to each region annually for field visits. This allows the central office staff to review conditions on the roadway with the regions, and to evaluate the correlation between the reported and forecast conditions, and actual conditions in the field. These formal and informal exchanges are intended to create a broad consensus and understanding of the pavement management process. The central office asset management personnel said such visits have provided valuable insight and quality-control information. From such interactions and visits they determined that their model was providing poor forecasts of cracking. What the model showed to be good performing sections were actually found to be suffering extensive cracking when viewed in the field The Utah asset management officials said while communication is critical to instilling asset management in an organization, the communication needs to be two way. The central office experts need to communicate about the powerful analytic and decision-making potential of the pavement management system, and its data bases. At the same time, the central office personnel can learn a great deal from the day-to-day field experience of the region personnel. The continuous and open communication between central office and field personnel is an important component of continually improving the pavement management process, they noted. Like with many other departments, the Utah asset management approach to optimization is a hybrid of both computational forecasts from the pavement management system combined with the professional engineering judgment of the staff in the field. The central office provides pavement program scenarios to each region illustrating an optimized program of projects generated from the statewide model. The regions review those lists of suggested projects but make the actual pavement selections. The consideration of both the model’s optimized list of projects combined with the field observations and experience of the region allows the insights of both the management system and the field personnel to be captured in the final pavement program. Once the regions have identified a six year program of projects, the central office staff gives it a high-level review to ensure the program is consistent with the statewide goals. Strategies for Adaption The Utah officials say their ever-improving pavement management process has allowed them to adapt to two critical changes. First, as they experience turnover in region personnel, the existing pavement management process provides significant analytic and institutional support to the new personnel. They find that the new personnel are anxious for insights into past pavement performance, into their range of investment options and about the various program scenarios they could pursue. The central office officials say the pavement management process provides proven templates for new region personnel to follow as they master their new positions. To further ensure consistency in its approach, the department created a Pavement Panel to help new region personnel select pavements. It consists of membership from the regions and central office. It acts like a peer review panel for the new personnel’s program and project decisions. Suggested pavement treatments are explained and put up for a vote by email among the 10 member panel. If at least 7 panelists agree with the selection, it is approved. If fewer than 7 approve, than the individual recommendation is reviewed by Central Office. The process serves to standardize the approach to treatments across the department, and to ensure that extra elements which drive up costs are not included. Also, the pavement management process has provided a rational and structured process for the department to use as it copes with the significantly higher material costs of recent years. Although its pavement program has not been reduced in terms of its overall budget, the purchasing power of that pavement budget has fallen by nearly half in recent years. The department was able to make rational – albeit difficult – tradeoffs in its pavement investment approach based upon its improved analytical capabilities. The department classified its system into Level I routes which include the Interstate Highways and generally the arterial network. The collectors and other minor routes are categorized as Level 2 routes. Pavement treatment priority will go to the Level I routes which carry about 70 percent of the state’s traffic volumes. Those routes will be actively managed and will receive the large majority of the department’s pavement budget. The low-volume Level 2 routes will receive primarily low-cost treatments such as chip seals. In general, the Level 2 routes have average daily traffic of less than 2,000 vehicles, with fewer than 500 trucks. The asset management staff said the difficult process of prioritizing the pavement program under such tight fiscal constraints has brought more region personnel to seek assistance from the pavement management system. The pavement management system has provided an invaluable assistance in providing various scenarios by which the regions can analyze which mix of projects can optimize their system with their limited resources. While the department has relied on its pavement management system for more than a decade for functions such as forecasting overall investment needs, the system now is playing a more critical analytic role because of the intensity of the pavemen...
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