Draft Investment Assessment Framework

The NZ Transport Agency is seeking feedback on its draft Investment Assessment Framework (IAF) including the new criteria for Road Maintenance Programmes. The draft was issued to all local authorities on 13 March and can be found here.

Feedback must be received by Friday 7 April.

The new IAF proposes changes that support a reduction from the current three assessment ‘factors’ to two. The changes apply to all requests for funding in the 2018/21 National Land Transport Programme (NLTP). They include:

1.      Replacing the current strategic fit assessment with a new results alignment assessment, including adding a 'very high' rating.

2.      Enabling proposals with very high benefit-cost ratios (>10) to be advanced where they may have a low results alignment.

3.      Removing the effectiveness rating and absorbing it into the business case approach.

4.      Greater emphasis on the application of the Transport Agency’s business case approach.

Together these changes will improve alignment between the IAF and the recently released draft Government Policy Statement on Land Transport.

For maintenance programmes, we have introduced a new concept; a CORE programme assessment. The intention is to provide all Approved Organisations with the earliest signal possible on the business case for their maintenance programme.

You should expect your regional Transport Agency Planning and Investment contact to be working closely with you as you review your Activity Management Plan, in preparation for submitting your programme request for the 2018/21 NLTP.

Robert Brodnax
General Manager Planning & Investment
NZ Transport Agency

Addressing procurement in your AMP

The draft Investment Assessment Framework (IAF) requires RCAs to outline their procurement and smart buyer behaviour in their AMPs.

REG has developed a Smart Buyer Self Assessment to help asset managers understand their RCA’s current procurement capability. It consists of 14 questions and takes a few minutes to complete.

It should enable you to gain a clear picture of the quality of your procurement processes, the attitude of your council, and capacity within your organisation. You can then include this information in your business case, and if necessary propose improvements to delivery models and processes.

How good is the data?

As users start to review their ONRC performance measures against others in the reporting tool, we’ve been receiving great questions such as - “how do I know the accuracy, completeness, and overall data quality of RCAs I’m comparing against?” 

The REG Data Work Group has also been giving this some thought and we have commenced a piece of work on how best to assess data quality. 

A list of checks that can be run against each RCA’s data will be developed, so that an overall assessment can be achieved.  This will look at such items as when the last roughness survey was completed across a network, or how extensively the “original cost” field is used in the surfacings table of RAMM. 

The exact details are still under development but we hope that, by the end of the first quarter of the 2017/2018 year, we will be able to provide a view on the quality of data for those ONRC performance measures which rely on RAMM data.

Sandra King joins Capability and Enabling group

Resource engineer Sandra King is bringing her expertise to the REG Capability and Enabling work group. Sandra is Infrastructure Investigation Engineer at Palmerston North City Council where she is busy writing their AMP. Her main focus at Palmerston North is future planning of the City’s transport network (3-30 years).

Sandra has valuable crossover experience in town planning, regulation and road engineering. She started as a civil engineer cadet at Manukau City Council, and also has a Bachelor’s degree in Resource Engineering and a Diploma in Environmental Management.

She has held a variety of engineering-related jobs around the country. We will be drawing on her broad experience of combining strategy and action.

Business case and AMP milestones

The timeline for developing your LTP and activity planning is getting tighter - this list of milestones shows where you should be.

(note: we have continued to include milestones that have passed as a checklist for progress and a reminder of the process.)

Understand the context for your AMP

May-August 2016: Review current strategy and start developing your strategic case. Complete self-assessment. Early engagement with key stakeholders and begin Point-of-Entry discussions with NZ Transport Agency (Round 4,5&6 workshops).

Resources: State Highway AMP, Auckland Transport 2015-18 AMP, Central Otago DC 2015/16-25/26 AMP Review, Auckland Transport ONRC gap analysis; REG online case studies.

Develop your AMP (timing variable between regions)

August-September 2016: Trial CLoS and performance measures and assess gaps in data. Identify network performance issues (Round 5&6 workshops).

Resources: REG online case study: Maintaining and renewing sealed pavements under the ONRC; ONRC Performance Measures – a general guide for using CLoS and performance measures.

October-November 2016: Develop a programme of activities to address network performance issues by assessing against defined strategic case problems (Round 7 workshops).

January-April 2017: Undertake gap analysis and identify benefits (Round 8 workshops).

Resources: REG online case study: Improved Option Selection - forward works programme optimisation.

May-August 2017: Identify programmes requiring investment or disinvestment.

Resources: REG online case study: NZTA programme review process.

July-October 2017: Finalise BCA AMP to enable engagement in LTP/RLTP process.

Resources: NZTA and regional councils available to advise.