By Arielle Swift, Contributing Author
When evaluating winter maintenance techniques, there are many outcomes you can focus on: maximizing budgeting power, sustainability, climate impacts, reporting on total employee dedication, educating the community, decreasing resources utilized, or requesting more/new resources.
Whichever your focus is, a SMART goal should be outlined and understood by the audience and winter maintenance crews.
SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound.
When creating SMART goals, focus on your stakeholders without regard to data you are currently capturing. Organizations often capture unnecessary, inconsistent, or unclean data. The first time creating SMART goals, it may seem difficult, but the more you format goals the ‘SMART’ way, the more instinctual and habitual it becomes.
Once goals and objectives are set and the audience is known, conduct research and leverage partnerships. Research ways to best evaluate your winter maintenance techniques, or what data points are needed to make an informed decision. If you are evaluating efficiency of winter maintenance operations, hone into more specifics, and prioritize the efficiencies sought.
Is an efficient budget more important than the efficiency of the operations? At what point does your maintenance operation become maximized? Finding the balance between marginal cost and marginal benefit requires capturing the correct data, in the correct way, at the correct time.
If your goal is less salt usage, there are many variables that may or may not be correlated. There are different personalities with every winter event.
After figuring out your SMART goal, decide on the best way to report and what data points that would be beneficial and necessary to collect. Often, you may find the data points needed to measure a specific goal are not currently being captured. If you do not have a history of a particular data point, that is OK. But if you need to capture it, then do it.
Historically, my organization has reported on the amount of snowfall as a performance measure. Another performance measure reported on the salt tonnage used each year. A more interesting and more insightful measure of winter operations and technique evaluation would overlay these two data points, along with the number of recorded winter events.
Increasing the density of information visualized can also help pinpoint which technique utilized during a particular season may be working better than another, assuming you implement more than one new technique each year. Future data points juxtaposed with the visualization could include type of winter precipitation, wet/dry snow, quantity of equipment utilized per event, fleet utilized (auxiliary or not), various areas per lane mile, type of equipment utilized, and more.
The best way to gauge your winter operations is by talking to snow fighters about utilizing data. But data cannot be the only driving factor in decision making.
Automate Obstacles
Operations change constantly during events. So, it’s important to look at hindrances. This includes hindrances to human capital, like illness or injury, hindrances on equipment, like accidents or defects reporting, and any unexpected or unknown variables that occur during operations.
Automate once you have identified hindrances and obstacles. Any downtime with personnel or equipment can have a huge impact on operations and morale. So, it is important to automate any processes that can increase reinstatement.
In my organization, we’ve automated injury reporting, accident reporting, defect reporting, and we are currently implementing after action reporting for winter events.
It sounds obvious, but automating reports that takes personnel or equipment out of service, decreases rebound time to get back into operations. If you identified an obstacle that you cannot automate, or do not know how to automate, leverage those partnerships. Reach out to technology teams, innovation teams, or other organizations. Often automating a process or procedure is a project personnel on these teams are more than willing to assist.
Power of Picture
You know your audience. So, after you get data points, smart goals, and have automated any hindrances, it is time to collect. The first year you may not be able to utilize data currently collected towards your smart goal. Again, that is OK. Explaining to stakeholders that proper data collection is currently being implemented to report more accurately on goals and objectives going forward is typically well received.
In the meantime, you can report as historically done, but also make a note that the following year’s reporting will be different. This gives individuals a heads up that things are changing and provides awareness on innovative processes and techniques occurring in your winter operations.
Once crucial datapoints have been collected and you have enough significant results or material, it’s time to visualize that data. When it comes to data visualization, this is an area that is often overlooked, but can have the biggest impact on stakeholders and operations.
The visualization is going to connect those viewing the data, so personalize it to your audience.
Internally, we use burn down charts for evaluating salt usage throughout the season by setting a goal of utilizing no more than 4,500 tons of salt each year, updating usage throughout the season. They can see the progress dwindle.
Our field operations supervisor posts tonnage used per driver to create a little healthy competition resulting in a decrease in salt usage, as well.
Some visuals Dubuque, Iowa uses to emphasize various perspectives are included here.
Snow and ice control overtime cost breakdown highlights the employee costs of winter operations. What is unique with this visualization is it separates holidays and weekends worked. This visualization was utilized in a presentation to the city council to highlight the dedication of winter operations’ employees. This highlights weekends and holidays personnel spent away from their families to ensure residents could spend time with their own families, which led to a decrease in plowing related complaints.
One memo provided a budget utilization update, which included portraying the impact of holiday overtime on the winter operations budget each year.
Public works is consistently under budgeted for winter operations’ holiday overtime line item. The value of this visualization was a $10,300 increase in winter operations’ holiday overtime budget reflected in fiscal year 2023.
If these visualizations were provided to different audiences, it would not have had the same outcome. If presenting city council, and thus residents, a graph of expenditures without the explanation of weekends and holidays worked, it would have led to an increase in criticism for over-expending the budget. A decrease in this line item would potentially lead to a decrease in the service level provided in the city.
Looking at fleet resiliency for winter operations and comparing that to various departments is another impactful visualization. Pulling this visualization together did not reflect what we thought it would. But it did show the need to replace our buses.
The size of the bubble in the bubble graph demonstrated the number of technician hours spent on the department compared to number of vehicle equivalent units (VEUs) and average age of the fleet.
To increase the value of your visualizations, make the visualization something that captures the attention and requires some investment from the viewer. When they have the ‘light bulb’ moment, it is hard to forget.
Now, this is not an approach for only winter maintenance. Once you have implemented these evaluation approaches to your winter operations, you can utilize it in street maintenance, curbside collection, or expand to increase equity in operations. R&B
Arielle Swift is the Assistant Public Works Director in Dubuque, Iowa.
