the plan provides an opportunity to educate stakeholders, and support ODOT partners in being able to articulate shared concerns and leverage shared knowledge. Because decision-making is distributed across many divisions, programs, and regional partners, this knowledge creation and transfer role is not necessarily about controlling decisions. Rather, it is about putting forth a more strategic agenda that can be focused upon by program managers or others in the state to address uncertainty.

Finally, HDOT Highway’s tool development process yielded a new level of focus on partnering both inside the agency with district staff and with external organizations, to be able to share and update the most current asset and environmental conditions data.

Agile planning requires agencies to build stronger cyclical linkages between planning activities and across departments and organizations.

Long-range planning has always been inherently uncertain. The very nature of our cyclical planning process is designed to revisit assumptions and trends every few years. However, current and emerging efforts at managing uncertainty are encouraging agencies to become even more focused on the iterative nature of planning and to seek opportunities to be more agile and responsive to change. Timing is a key challenge, both in understanding the timeline of impact for different types of uncertainty, and in managing and coordinating the data that is generated when tracking or forecasting change across different planning efforts.

Following completion of Alaska Moves 2050, the DOT is considering how to coordinate a “family of plans” as a more integrated whole, with cyclical procedures for updating and sharing information and knowledge between planning activities. Similarly, HRTPO is working to line up other efforts better with the LRTP (the timing of which is constrained by federal requires) to better facilitate information flow between plans.

All four case agencies recognize that dissemination of information and bridging knowledge gaps within and between departments is key. To advance from planning to implementation requires that organizations translate insights into direction or information for specific groups or staff within a department or at partner organizations, particularly MPOs and RPOs. This also requires organizational self-reflection around how planning and programming relate, in general, not just in the context of uncertainty.

Phase II: Summary of NCHRP Research Report 1168 guide, Toolkit, Testing, and Peer Exchange

Practitioners within State DOTs and MPOs know that recognizing and planning for uncertainty is important to their mission of delivering safe, efficient, and sustainable mobility. There have been a range of efforts, both qualitative and qualitative, within long-range plans and other planning processes to analyze uncertainty. Data, tools, and methods are being actively used to engage with risk and uncertainty. However, the core gap identified by this research was between analysis

and action. To address that gap, we developed our framework for managing uncertainty to address the following questions that a user of our guide may ask:

• What uncertainties do I want to consider, and in which business processes?
• How can my strategic and long-range planning process enable me to manage key uncertainties across my business processes? What can we do to make agency processes more robust and resilient?
• How can I set my organization up for continuous learning and adaptation through monitoring external conditions and agency effectiveness?
• What organizational capacity – in terms of workforce, procedures, training, and technical resources – do I need to build up to plan for, manage, and monitor uncertainty?

Task 5. Development of Guidance and Toolkit

Multiple points of entry.

The guide was developed to provide multiple “points of entry” for the reader. The team recognized that users of the guidance may have one or more motivating factors for wishing to improve their planning for uncertainty. For example, an agency may be struggling with a particular source of uncertainty (e.g., CAVs, economic change) or may wish to start with a specific part of the planning process. Our goal, therefore, was to provide enough introductory content to explain what uncertainty is and why it matters to transportation planning, while also allowing the reader to readily navigate to the most relevant sections of guidance.

Focus on strategic and long-range planning as structuring processes.

In developing the guide, we also placed the core focus on strategic planning and long-range planning as structuring processes that can set up a State DOT or MPO to better manage uncertainty throughout their operations. Strategic and long-range planning provide the long-term perspective to consider many types of uncertainties and offers an opportunity to establish goals, procedures, performance measures, and analytical resources that can serve agencies in other parts of their planning and programming. Moreover, one of the key insights of the research is that agencies are better equipped to address uncertainty when they consider their activities within a “family of plans.” Rather than undertaking each LRTP in isolation, true learning and adaptation to address uncertainty requires a more holistic perspective that connects long-term planning with more mid- and short-term action. To reflect this perspective, the guide was developed to provide specific strategies and actions that are relevant to strategic and long-range planning while also providing guidelines for how other agency activities can (a) be supported by inputs from LRTPs, and (b) provide feedback to subsequent plans.

Developing guide components. Development of individual guide components was organized into three work areas, each of which was identified in the research as critical to understanding uncertainty: (a) Organization and Process, (b) Methods and Tools, and (c) Communications and Engagement. The team began by brainstorming discrete content under each category that could address needs identified in Phase I of the research. We explored potential format, considering options such as simple how-to descriptions, illustrative examples, and worksheets. We also

recognized that some guide elements require more detail than others. Because tools, methods, and data are dynamic, guide development was focused on explaining why and how a particular strategy can support management of uncertainty, and on providing enough information to support someone who wishes to dig more deeply into an approach. We collected and provided examples and references where possible. The guide was intentionally not designed to be comprehensive or complete in terms of resources, as any such attempt would quickly be rendered out-of-date.

Testing, Iterating, Packaging, and Restructuring. The team developed individual guide components agreed up with the Panel for testing with agencies, as described below. Testing required that the team make guide content more concrete and connected to specific agency situations. As part of testing, we also refined our understanding of different phases within the long-range planning cycle including scoping activities that happen prior to a long-range plan (or similar), activities that typically occur within a plan, and implementation activities that happen after completion of a given plan that work to translate plan findings or priorities into the rest of an agency’s operations. Following the testing activities, we refined guide content based on the testing experience and feedback form the Panel. We also focused on restructuring and packaging guide content to make it easier for the reader to find relevant content. This restructuring was designed to mirror the cyclical planning process.

Testing of Guidance and Toolkit

We engaged several transportation agencies in workshops to test the guide materials developed and ask for feedback to help refine the materials.

In this task, we partnered with five testing agencies to work through individual elements of the guide as applied to a specific agency situation. Staff from each agency selected focus areas that were most relevant to their goals for improving understanding and management of uncertainty. They also identified workshop invitees, with a focus on securing representation from multiple areas of their organization. The partner test agencies and their areas of focus are shown in Table 3.

The research team developed facilitation materials comprised of a) a brief introduction to the project and its goals and high-level findings, b) background on individual agency history with uncertainty and workshop goals, and c) testing activities, using materials from the guide tailored to each agency’s context. Participants were also invited to reflect on the workshop and provide feedback on testing at the end.

Table 3. Partner Test Agencies and Areas of Focus

Staff from each partner test agency reflected on what they learned through their participation in the testing exercise, as well as how the guide and toolkit could be improved. These reflections indicated that partner agencies found the guidance and toolkit to be useful and allowed them to more meaningfully incorporate uncertainty into their planning processes. Both MassDOT and VTrans identified the need to better institutionalize knowledge in their workforce and discussed the challenges associated with limited agency capacity as they consider how to incorporate uncertainty into their planning processes. KYTC, IowaDOT, and VTrans also noted that the complexities that individual sources of uncertainty create can interact and present additional challenges. For example, uncertainties related to the economy and transportation funding sources can present additional challenges when attempting to plan for the uncertainties that the environment and a changing workforce present. Discussion during the testing session with ARC suggested that agencies deal with the challenges associated with planning for uncertainty by integrating uncertainty into their planning processes gradually as they are able, rather than confronting the daunting task of incorporating uncertainty into all their plans at once.

Peer Exchange

We built on the feedback offered by individual partner agencies in the testing process during a peer exchange, where representatives from each partner agency shared lessons learned and their reflections after having had additional time to process their testing workshop. The main goals of the peer exchange were to:

• Invite sharing by each of the test agencies on their experience with guide components, including lessons learned and identification of future opportunities
• Facilitate knowledge sharing among agencies on their approaches to incorporating uncertainty into long-range planning
• Gather feedback to strengthen the guide, especially through practical examples
• Gather input on the guide’s applicability in diverse agency settings

• Identify interest or need for further research or implementation efforts beyond the project

Discussion during the peer exchange noted that the level of effort required to incorporate various sources of uncertainty into a variety of existing agency planning processes was not insignificant. Further discussion noted that communication of how and why uncertainty is being incorporated into agency planning processes must be thoughtful to avoid confusing the public and policymakers. Participants in the peer exchange also acknowledged that incorporating uncertainty into planning processes may be especially difficult for smaller agencies, since a wide variety of data and expertise may be needed.

Peer exchange participants valued the opportunity to hear how other agencies are communicating issues related to uncertainty to decisions makers, managing internal communication, collecting data, and forecasting trends, but noted that there are not yet definitive best practices on how to incorporate uncertainty into their planning processes. Because of this, many agencies struggle to determine what activities would make the best use of limited resources. Participants also noted that there is a need to articulate how exploration and analysis of uncertainty can provide an ongoing benefit to agencies. Participants highlighted that uncertainty cannot be considered as a “one-and-done” topic for a stand-alone plan, but rather should be considered within an ongoing iterative cycle of planning, learning, implementation, and feedback.

Appendices

The following appendices to this Conduct of Research Report provide further detail on the research process and findings:

• Appendix A: Foundational Research: Uncertainty Drivers, Data, and Methods
• Appendix B: Outreach Summary: Questionnaire and Focus Groups
• Appendix C: Case Studies
• Appendix D: Agency Testing Workshops
• Appendix E: Testing Peer Exchange Summary