Advancing TSMO: Making the Business Case for Institutional, Organizational, and Procedural Changes

Introduction

Transportation Systems Management and Operations (TSMO) presents a key opportunity for transportation agencies today and many agencies have recently been making a significant effort to better leverage TSMO to improve system performance in a cost effective way. This guide explores how a transportation agency's established Institutional, Organizational, and Procedural (IOP) "way of doing business" can be changed to reduce barriers and increase capabilities for effective TSMO.

The Need for Transportation Systems Management and Operations

Transportation agencies are dedicated to improving the safety, mobility, and reliability of transportation systems to more effectively move people and goods. Agencies also work to support other objectives that serve their customers, including improving quality of life, increasing economic efficiencies, and reducing emissions. Responsibility and accountability to the public to wisely invest resources and achieve optimal performance are key drivers across the public sector, and transportation agencies are no exception. Within highway transportation, financial and right-of-way constraints on adding new lanes have restricted agencies' ability to add enough new capacity to relieve congestion through traditional road building approaches. Many causes of congestion only affect the roadway at certain times, such as nonrecurring congestion from events like crashes and bad weather that take some of the available capacity temporarily out-of-service due to lane blockages or deteriorated road conditions that reduce traffic flow. These events are not directly addressed by building new capacity, though the added capacity does indirectly mitigate these issues in the short- to medium-term.

Making the most effective use of existing highway capacity and coupling new road building projects with strategies that directly address nonrecurring congestion are important to meeting current transportation needs and will continue to be moving forward. In meeting these needs, a set of specific strategies has evolved to support improved transportation systems management and operations—known by the shorthand abbr, TSMO—with the goal of maintaining, and even increasing, the effective capacity and service of transportation networks. TSMO is an emerging term used to describe an integrated program of projects, strategies, services, technologies, and processes to plan for, manage, and operate whole transportation networks to optimize system-wide performance. TSMO can also be applied in combination with projects to expand transportation facilities, such as adding lanes, to enhance the effectiveness of these projects, especially when it comes to managing nonrecurring congestion. Most agencies have been conducting some TSMO activities for years (although not necessarily under the name of TSMO), such as managing crashes and work zones. Many educational efforts to increase TSMO awareness and understanding at agencies across the country have resulted in participants' realization that TSMO is simply what they do on a day-to-day basis and the need for increased efficiency and collaboration is essentially a need to view these existing TSMO activities through a system- and agency-wide lens. On the other end of the TSMO spectrum, some strategies, such as preparing Transportation Management Centers (TMC) for big data from connected vehicles, are working to take advantage of still-evolving technologies. Some specific examples of the strategies that make up TSMO include:

• Managing traffic in and around construction work zones.
• Upgrading traffic signals for increased traffic-responsiveness.
• Clearing traffic incidents, like crashes and breakdowns, more quickly and thereby improving clearance safety.
• Anticipating and treating the effects of bad weather, such as snow and ice, and adjusting traffic control to help with traffic flow.
• Metering ramps to improve throughput.
• Improving traffic signal coordination for improved flow.
• Providing driver warnings and advisories in advance of crashes or congestion.
• Coordinating and integrating systems, services, and partnerships.
• Capitalizing on new technology to detect and communicate traffic information.

Most of these strategies, compared to capacity improvements, are relatively low in cost and can be accomplished in the short term. Improving the system's operational management has the potential to offer a wide range of benefits, both directly to customers in terms of improved service through application of the above strategies, and to the agency itself.

Extensive educational efforts to increase TSMO awareness and understanding at agencies across the country have resulted in participants' realization that viewing TSMO activities through a system- and agency-wide lens provides a useful framework for advancing their efforts to reduce both recurring and nonrecurring congestion on a more efficient and cost effective basis. Conversion of TSMO efforts from a set of ad hoc activities to a formal, organized, and sustained program establishes TSMO as one of the agency's key objectives and activities and establishes appropriate standard approaches and arrangements with other functions in the agency, like construction and maintenance, thereby moving towards "institutionalizing" TSMO on a sustainable basis.

The breadth of related TSMO strategies is both a potential strength and a challenge. Many agencies find that TSMO touches the entire agency. This presents a collaboration challenge in terms of coordinating across agency units. It also offers an opportunity to use the advancement of TSMO as an avenue for improving communication and integration across the agency, which provides benefits for both TSMO and other agency activities.

Experience has shown that integrating TSMO strategies can have a significant impact on measurable highway performance both by reducing travel time delay and providing for more predictable travel times. In addition, integrating TSMO elements into new construction, safety projects, and maintenance programs can provide important enhancements to their effectiveness. TSMO not only provides public agencies with a growing toolbox of individual solutions and a growing ability to use these solutions proactively through technology, but also encourages agencies to combine them to achieve greater performance throughout the entire system. Integration can happen at multiple levels: among a set of strategies; across multiple State Department of Transportation (DOT) units, jurisdictions, and agencies; and across different modes. Together this integration ensures that the entire transportation systems performs optimally.

Overcoming these challenges and leveraging these opportunities through the lens of IOP are a major focus of this guide. TSMO presents a key opportunity for transportation agencies today and many agencies have recently been making a significant effort to better leverage TSMO to improve system performance in a cost effective way. This Guide explores how a transportation agency's established Institutional, Organizational, and Procedural "way of doing business" can be changed to reduce barriers and increase capabilities for effective TSMO.

The Need for Institutional, Organizational, and Procedural Changes

Over the last decade as highway capacity improvements became more constrained, concern grew over the impacts of rising congestion in normal peak periods. To this issue was added increasing unpredictable delay, especially problematic in an economic context with a rising importance of "just in time" service. In response, "Reliability" became one of the four research and solution development focuses of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) program. One of the early products (2012) of that research focused on Institutional Architecture to Improve Systems Operations and Management¹. The findings of this research focused on identifying the procedural and institutional characteristic of agencies with the most effective TSMO programs. This research was used to develop a framework, called the TSMO Capability Maturity Model (CMM), that identified the key dimensions and levels of agency capability associated with effective TSMO. The six key dimensions are: business processes, systems and technology, performance measurement, culture, organization and staffing, and collaboration. Criteria were developed characterizing incremental levels observed in best practice based on the goal of continuous improvement.

The TSMO CMM framework was subsequently utilized to establish an agency self-evaluation process in which agency TSMO management and staff identified current strengths and weakness regarding each dimension to identify the current level of capability—and used the level criteria as a target against which to develop specific actions for incremental improvement in each dimension. Since 2009, over 30 States, most with significant TSMO activities, have conducted Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) sponsored CMM self-assessment workshops at the statewide or regional level². In these workshops, TSMO program managers and staff assess the current agency status regarding their TSMO efforts in terms of the CMM's six key dimensions of capability. The assessment provides the participants with a starting place to develop agency actions to improve the effectiveness of the agency's TSMO efforts, often in incremental steps that advance operations. Many of these actions to advance TSMO require actions on the part of agency leadership.

These workshops confirmed that effective TSMO implementation requires the development of a set of specific arrangements within State DOTs that differ somewhat from those that have been used to support traditional highway construction and maintenance. Some of these changes are largely "technical"—such as systems engineering and ITS device deployment—and largely within the span-of-control of agency units directly responsible for TSMO activities. However, improving TSMO effectiveness goes beyond changes in systems and technology to include the needed TSMO-specific procedures and arrangements that may be at odds with legacy arrangements. These changes, or actions, generally fall into three categories:

• Institutional. Actions that are focused on growing an agency culture that values TSMO, including mission and objectives, technical understanding, leadership, outreach, and program legal authorities.
• Organizational. Actions that adjust the structure of responsibilities including reorganization, staff training and development, recruitment and retention, and collaboration to better support TSMO functions.
• Procedural. Actions that improve business and technical processes to better incorporate TSMO, including adjustments in planning, programming and budgeting, systems engineering, and performance measurement.

Nationwide experience and research points to the fact that these kinds of changes may not be easy, but are essential to unlocking the full potential of TSMO strategies towards "mainstreaming" TSMO as an effective, formal first line agency program.

Changes in Institutional, Organizational, and Procedural (IOP) arrangements are generally not expensive. However, they can be challenging since, in varying degrees, they may involve some reorganization, introduce new reporting requirements, involve competition for resources or staffing, or require changes that impact the agency more broadly such as new policies or objectives. Moreover, these changes can be incremental in nature, consistent with staff resources and the need to learn new approaches. As one State DOT report puts it:

"Operational improvements can be "advanced through better integration, coordination, and systematic and strategic implementation. At the same time, and equally important, this also requires a cultural change within the department to transform operations from how it has been historically viewed and delivered to an integrated statewide program. Cultural change is difficult and time consuming to implement due to institutional barriers and issues associated with the particular program.³"

A Note on Terminology

In the emerging field of TSMO, agencies use different terms to describe the intent of making IOP changes to support more effective TSMO on a continuous basis. The terms "mainstreaming TSMO" and "institutionalizing TSMO" are sometimes used: however, these terms should not be taken to imply that there is any single recipe for making systematic IOP changes. The general intent is for agencies to make incremental IOP changes to support the continuous enhancement of their TSMO activities, which, when fully integrated, should enhance agencies' services and functions as a whole. IOP changes to advance TSMO should be identified and implemented with consideration for each agency's unique context, culture, and nomenclature. DOTs at different levels of implementing TSMO should and do take different approaches to the types and extent of the changes.

Purpose of the Guide

This guide provides a process for the development and communication of the business case for making IOP changes to advance TSMO. The business case is a well-formed argument that is based on compelling qualitative and anecdotal information as well as technical analyses that rationalize and justify the need for the IOP changes to advance TSMO. It involves identifying the transportation problem to be addressed; relating the problem to effective TSMO; showing how effective TSMO requires certain IOP changes; and, illustrating the payoffs versus the costs.

In most cases the need for making the business case will occur when an agency already conducts a range of TSMO activities and realizes the need to evolve its TSMO activities from a collection of "ad hoc" activities to a set of integrated practices that are efficient and effective for a complete range of current and future strategies. Formalizing TSMO processes within an agency will likely to involve IOP changes that may introduce challenges in the agency's approach to legacy programs and will require a strong IOP business case.

Overview of the Guide

This guide provides supporting concepts, actions, and tips to transportation agencies working to create and document the business case for an effective TSMO program: a discussion of the general context for business case preparation; descriptions of alternative strategies for communicating the business case; an outline of business case content; and a discussion of the types and forms of business case presentations and related media that may be appropriate for varying contexts. The guide is organized as follows:

• Part I. Getting Started on Making the Business Case. Introduces the objectives for this guide while covering some assumptions about the business case preparer, and details seven characteristics of a successful business case.
• Part II. Preparing the Business Case for Institutional, Organizational, and Procedural Changes. Provides steps for developing the business case, broken down into seven essential sections of an effective business case.
• Part III. Agency Leadership Support for Key Institutional, Organizational, and Procedural Changes. Discusses the significance of actions and resource expenditures related to agency leadership and provides insights for navigating this critical area.
• Part IV. Tailoring the Business Case to Specific Audiences. Discusses and provides recommendations on preparing the business case for a variety of key stakeholder audiences in a variety of formats to best suit the target audience.