curriculum

Below is an outline of the subjects that will be presented and discussed during the formal classroom training portion of the program.

Overview
- What is operations?
- The Customer vs. the Institutions
  - What do traveler’s need for mobility?
  - What is adequate customer service?
  - Who are the providers of infrastructure operations (roles, relationships, etc.)
  - What is missing
- The institutional agenda
  - Build, preserve, operate, enforce, advise related to the supply network
  - What is the current state-of-play in operations
  - What are the roles of the players and are they doing their jobs?
  - The role of the State DOT in operations
  - Are agencies organized and managed for operations?
- How does it operations relate to ITS?
- Ingredients of operations (overview – setting the stage for the rest of the course)
  - Operations as a system
  - Relevance and leverage
  - Performance measures
  - Customer service
  - Organization
  - Management
Operations as a system
- Review of pre-study material
- Supply-demand concepts
- Thinking regionally (What is a region, scale of system, travel-shed, not jurisdictions)
- Corridor management
- Concept of operations
- Engineering tools and dimensions (control, communications, analysis, maintenance)
Relevance and leverage
- Definition of mobility
- Relation to systems engineering
- Scale of impacts compared with new construction
- Benefits and costs
Performance measures
- Importance of performance measurement
  - Incentivize staff
  - Internal communications
  - External communications (what do the public and elected officials want to hear?)
- What measures are unique to operations?
  - Mobility
  - Safety
  - Maintenance
- What is good enough? (Is perfect the enemy of good?)
- Data sources and analysis techniques
- Technology
Customer service
- Definition of customers (households, businesses, trucks, travelers, commuters, etc.)
- Just-in-time delivery (commercial impacts of operations)
- What are customers’ expectations?
- How do we communicate with customers?
  - Status/performance reporting
  - Response to inquiries/complaints, etc.
  - Innovative approaches
    1. Personalized intersection monitoring
    2. Telephone numbers on VMS
- Customer satisfaction surveys (implementation and interpretation)
- Annual reports
Organization
- Legacy structure (mission, etc.)
- Case studies with representative organizational structures
- Stovepiping – the enemy of operations
- Organizational alternatives (matrix vs. tree)
- Headquarters vs. district
Management
- Staff incentives and management
- Differences between public and private sector management
- Planning for operations
- Project management (is it still relevant – accountability related to mission)
- Contracting
- Outsourcing
- Funding and budgeting
- “Selling” operations internally