Effective monitoring requires the regular analysis of the information being gathered in order to continuously review the performance of the project against the established Transport Planning Objectives and STAG Criteria and the impacts of the project on established policy directives. Used in this way, Monitoring should identify any areas of under-performance, and should also identify factors causing under-performance, thus allowing practitioners to implement appropriate changes at an early stage.
Monitoring performance is fundamentally important as it allows a measurement to be made of whether a project has been successfully implemented or not. The current focus in transport planning, and many other areas of government, is to measure success in terms of Best Value. This requires a measurement of outcomes for projects to be made rather than the outputs of an authority's activity.
A Monitoring Plan for inclusion within the implementation stage of a project must be clearly identified. It should be possible to establish this strategy early in the process to ensure the gathering of relevant and appropriate information.
The levels of effort and expenditure required to monitor a project will vary. There are a range of factors which should be considered when determining the appropriate level of effort and expenditure for a particular project, including the level of resources available (both in terms of time and finances); the scale of the project; the degree of innovation of the project; and the degree of risk exposure associated with adverse outcomes and the quality/robustness of the Monitoring outcome.
Resource requirements associated with Monitoring should also be determined by the amount of information already available. It is important for practitioners to scan for information that may already be in the public domain. This would include Best Value reviews, Audit Commission reviews and modernising local government sources. It should be noted that there are also on-going traffic surveys and national data sources to draw upon.
