Project

Idaho Compass Performance Measure Framework

The Community Planning Association of Southwest Idaho engaged EDR Group (now EBP) to make their long-range plan relevant to everyday decision making. The vision was to create a "performance measurement framework (PMF)" that would enable decision-makers to understand how decisions about transportation investments, land use, and other local or regional policies help or hinder progress towards the regional transportation and economic performance goals identified in Communities in Motion 2040. The framework needed to be data-driven and integrated with other business processes to more closely connect the long-range planning process with day-to-day decision-making.

EDR Group (now EBP) convened a series of internal and external stakeholder meetings to identify the use cases, needed features and data and analysis components for the framework. Through this process, a number of existing GIS and modeling data streams were identified and methods for further data preparation were developed.

There were two technical products of this project, which also included a vision for additional tools utilizing the Framework concepts in the future. The first is a web-based database and visualization tool that enables COMPASS to demonstrate how different investment/policy "packages" affect the regional economy and each of eight different areas of performance in the long term. This tool builds on COMPASS’s standard web-based ESRI geodatabases and existing workflows when possible to maximize efficiency and consistency. Each performance area is tracked by multiple performance metrics and performance indices are calculated for each area and overall for a package. The second product is a spreadsheet-based project prioritization tool that allows needs-based and budget-constrained prioritization and the option to explore different benefits and performance weighting schemes. The products utilize data types available given the scope of each analysis.