How can trained staff keep momentum once a course ends?
A course gives you a starting point. Questions often come up later, when you are drafting specifications, standards or plans for your Authority.
By Mark Davies
Managing Partner, Intelligent Transport Advisory
Related topics
- after training support
- post-course support
- bus franchising support
- transport authority advice
- procurement specification support
- bus reform capability
Where teams get stuck
Each Right of Way course ends with usable outputs. They record the group's reasoning and agreed actions, ready for your team to use in its work.
Back at work, delegates need to turn the course outputs into documents the programme can rely on. The questions they face often depend on the task in hand.
These outputs can feed into the documents your Authority needs for its programme, procurement, customer services and, later, operational delivery. They may include:
- —A service or technical specification for procurement
- —Customer standards for in-person and digital channels
- —A programme plan with governance and decision points
- —Operational processes for the period after launch.
Why a timely answer matters
Drafting these raises detailed questions. What level of detail does a specification need? Which option suits our network? How should a standard be measured? A delegate may know the principle from the course but still be unsure how to apply it.
When a team has no one to ask, it has three choices. It can guess, wait or commission formal advice. Guessing risks errors that surface later in procurement or delivery. Waiting stalls the work. Formal advice can take weeks to arrange for what may be a single question.
A short, written answer at the right moment keeps the draft moving. It also comes from people who already understand the Authority's context, because they delivered the course using its own evidence.
How After-Course Support works
Your Authority agrees a six-month retainer, from £5,000 plus VAT, and nominates the people who can submit questions. We invoice your Authority at the start of the retainer and send a monthly statement showing the spend.
A delegate submits a question through our online form. We confirm whether it needs a standard response (£150 plus VAT) or a detailed response (£250 plus VAT). A detailed response needs research, references or a set of options. If a question is too open, we arrange a short call to agree its scope.
We aim to reply by email within two to three working days. If a question needs longer, we tell the delegate when to expect the response.
- —Standard — £150 plus VAT. A written answer with a clear explanation.
- —Detailed — £250 plus VAT. A documented response that needs research, references or a set of options.
Where it fits
After-Course Support suits questions that arise while your staff are drafting their own work. Our responses are guidance for your Authority to consider. Your Authority retains every decision.
Larger pieces of work, where a team needs an experienced practitioner alongside it for several weeks, may suit mentoring instead. After-Course Support is always optional, and it is never a condition of booking a course.
Useful questions
Before a course ends, the delegate group should ask:
- —Which outputs from this course need to become programme documents?
- —Who will draft them, and by when?
- —What questions is your team most likely to face while drafting?
- —How will your team get answers without holding up the work?
- —Who in your Authority can approve support requests?
Talk to us about After-Course Support
To add After-Course Support to a Right of Way course, email contact@intelligenttransportadvisory.co.uk.