Section 5: Objectives, targets and indicators

Preparation for Section 5

Travel Plan Development contains two streams. One is for workplace travel plans and the second for school travel plans. The first of the following extracts is from the workplace travel plan study guide and the second is from the schools travel plan study guide. Both also use the freight travel plan video clip.

This section draws upon the Travel Plan Resource Pack for Employers (Section 4) the travel plan case studies for Nottingham City Hospital, Addenbrookes Hospital, Vodafone and Bluewater and the Tulln Hospital DVD clips. All of these are available from the GT014 course website.

5.1 Establishing objectives

Step 2 of the travel plan cycle, as shown in Figure 3.2, is 'Identify roles and responsibilities' and so you may consider it out of sequence to be looking now at establishing objectives. This is a bit of a 'chicken and egg' thing, as the two are interlinked. To some extent you need to define objectives before deciding who is suited to implement them; on the other hand, some identification of roles is needed to sort out the objectives!

What has happened in this course is that in a broad way, we started to consider roles and responsibilities in the previous section by identifying organisational motivations and where the responsibility for a travel plan will sit. This allows us to consider objectives and then return to roles and responsibilities for a more detailed consideration. In practice, some sort of loop like this is how travel plans get developed.

Section 4 of the Travel Plan Resource Pack for Employers is about developing objectives, targets and indicators. (This part of the course will provide a commentary and guide to use this material.) It begins by considering setting objectives, targets and indicators, with Figure 4.1 showing the relationship between them. They are defined as follows:

• Objectives: the high-level aims of your plan. Objectives will give your plan direction and will provide the focus for your plan.
• Targets: the measurable goals you will need to set in order to assess whether or not you have achieved the objectives of your plan.
• Indicators: the elements you will monitor to identify whether your targets have been met and your objectives achieved.

Comment

A criticism of the Resource Pack is that it only rather sketchily covers (in Section 1) the relationship between a travel plan and an organisation's goals and purposes. A first stage in setting objectives is to specify the business/organisational goals that a travel plan can contribute to, which we have done in the previous section. That then identifies the objectives that a travel plan should fulfil.