Transportation Comparative Benchmarking Platform
The National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP)
Developed in support of NCHRP project 20-118 by High Street Consulting Group (2017)
This platform supports comparative benchmarking among state departments of transportation. It is developed as part of NCHRP Report 20-118. It enables users to quickly evaluate their agency’s performance relative to peers on pre-determined measures. The platform will provide a centralized and standardized way of viewing performance on multiple transportation performance measures.
Peer analysis (comparing a given agency’s performance against its peers).
Trend analysis (the same agency’s performance over time).
Peer trend analysis, and most importantly.
The platform facilitates exchange of information between platform users, since the intent of comparative benchmarking is learning and improvement.
The platform is intended for transportation agency users, and in particular mid-level to senior-level managers and practitioners. The platform’s intent is to foster collaborative discussion in support of continuous improvement among the actual practitioners who support transportation agencies in achieving identified performance goals.
The benchmarking platform concept design presented here is intended to support both independent benchmarking and benchmarking network users. In an independent benchmarking use scenario, individual agencies set peer grouping comparisons of their own choice, evaluate their performance based on measures derived from publicly available national data sources, and use the results for reaching out independently to peer agencies to learn noteworthy practices. Under a benchmarking network use scenario, a benchmarking network (existing outside the platform as a tightly connected group of peers) uses the platform with self-reported data. For benchmarking networks, the platform acts as a specialized information-sharing channel to allow for efficient and effective comparison of performance and exchange of noteworthy practices that enable learning. To support benchmarking networks, custom benchmarks may be defined (by request to the site administrator in the demonstration version of the benchmarking platform). Member agencies are granted access to view and contribute network measure data.
