HOW EFFECTIVE ARE YOUR WINTER MAINTENANCE PRACTICES?

Winter maintenance is critical to ensuring mobility and safety to the traveling public during inclement winter weather. For an agency to make the best use of their limited resources available for winter maintenance it is important that the agency be able to determine how well their storm-fighting tactics are and how good a job they are doing in their overall strategy.

This Click, Listen, and Learn Session will present how performance measures can be developed and applied in the field of winter maintenance.

There are four critical factors that have to be considered in developing performance measures in winter maintenance.

First, the severity of the storm that the agency faces must be determined. This determines how challenging the task of winter maintenance for any given storm will be.

Second, the effectiveness of the chosen tactics used to combat the storm.

Third, the effort expended in fighting a given storm must be fully and accurately measured. Furthermore, these costs need to be benchmarked, if at all possible, against cost values from other agencies.

And, fourth, the results or outcomes of the agency efforts must be measured in a reliable, objective, and repeatable way to assess strategic effectiveness. There are a number of ways in which performance outcomes for winter maintenance can be measured and these will be reviewed and discussed.

However, even having completed these four steps (which is quite an achievement) the performance results are of no value unless they are put to use.

The presentation will also discuss how these results can be used to allow an agency to improve its winter maintenance activities and make the best use of its limited resources.


After viewing this program, participants will be better able to:

• Measure how severe a given winter storm is, and how much effort they have expended in fighting that storm.
• Implement an appropriate performance measurement system, using objective and repeatable measurements
• Evaluate their winter maintenance activities in light of their performance measurements and enhance those activities to make best use of their limited resources.

*** Note - As Sponsors of the event, City of Winnipeg Streets Maintenance Employees may attend at no charge ***