Performance monitoring in NISTO

Performance monitoring in NISTO

Performance monitoring is one of the main activities of NISTO. Monitoring is an integral part of the project evaluation cycle. It is a systematic collection of data to measure changes in the project indicators. It will facilitate the assessment of project success or failure based on objective quantitative and qualitative data. It will also give feedback to the project management team and the decision makers about the progress of the project during implementation and therefore it will enable them to take corrective actions if necessary. In addition, monitoring can help internal and external communication about the project: it can give information on progress, success and failure.

 

Figure 1 The project evaluation cycle (Source: VUB-MOBI)

 

Performance monitoring has four main phases (Figure 1):

 

1. Baseline measurement, which takes place before the project implementation starts. Its objective is to collect data about the current situation, which will be the basis of comparison for the further evaluation steps.
2. Monitoring during implementation: Project progress is monitored at major milestones of the project in order to track project progress and give feedback to the project team and decision makers. This monitoring makes it possible to modify the project during implementation if it is deemed necessary based on the results of the monitoring.
3. End-of-project measurement: Data from this measurement will be compared to the baseline measurement to evaluate project outcomes and the achievement of targets.
4. Post-project monitoring: In case of urban mobility projects and especially if the main objective of the project is to influence travel behaviour, it is important that monitoring continues even after the project is finished in order to capture effects that would only appear months or years after implementation. Modal shift or changes in travel behaviour, for example, usually appear slowly and may not be measurable until the end of the project implementation. Continuous monitoring is also very important for the implementation of plans and strategies.

 

In the NISTO project, the performance of five demonstration projects is being monitored in order to validate the evaluation framework. The set of indicators to be monitored is based on the NISTO evaluation framework developed in work package 1. Demonstration partners will collect data about the progress of the NISTO indicators which will be used for the evaluation. Performance monitoring guidelines have been produced by VUB to help the systematic data collection of the partners. The monitoring activities will take place between July 2014 and May 2015. Data is collected from various sources: measurements, surveys, official and operator statistics, interviews and through modelling and estimation. The collected data will be analysed and used for the evaluation of the projects. In addition, the experience of the partners with data collection and evaluation will be used to adapt the NISTO evaluation framework and to set up the final online toolkit.

 

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