Overview

The Transport for London Safety and Citizenship Initiative provides children with training on how to use transport safely and responsibly throughout the capital.

They aim to train 100,000 children this year and 125,000 next year on Underground, bus, river, road, cycle, tram, DLR and taxi safety. They use Asta Teamplan to optimise the time of ten training officers who are deployed across hundreds of schools.

Training children on the safe use of public tranport

Background

The TfL Safety and Citizenship team has grown significantly in just 12 months. Sonia Bruce, administrator for the initiative, explains: “Last year we only had a couple of training officers doing outreach school work and they were just focussed on training children about how to use the Underground.

Transport for London quickly saw the good results we were achieving and decided to extend the programme - providing us with increased funding to enable us to recruit new staff.”  It now employs 12 staff, including ten delivering outreach work in schools across London.

The need

This rapid period of growth meant the older system of managing the programme could not cope and an automated system was required.

“We were using a whole mix of systems – lots of separate spreadsheets, Microsoft Outlook schedules, and bits of paper – but the growth meant we clearly needed an information management system to make sure all staff were on track to meet their targets,” says Sonia.

The solution

Sonia and her team were quickly up and running with Asta Teamplan due to its intuitive, easy to use design: “We needed a system that was very user-friendly for everyone, ideally with a familiar Windows look and feel, and Asta Teamplan fitted the bill,” she adds.

Another major benefit of Asta Teamplan to TfL is the reporting function, says Sonia: “Asta Teamplan is really good for reporting as it is both powerful and clear. It starts at the bottom and allows you to build up a picture of what’s going on and from there produce tailored reports. We use this as the main system to check that we are hitting our targets.”

They evaluated other project and resource management systems before deciding on Asta Teamplan for its flexibility and functionality.

“Many of the other systems just came from the viewpoint of the manager who is controlling everything and provided high level reporting but were weaker at the more detailed level. Asta Teamplan has both: planning at the detailed level which then provides the basis for solid, accurate high level reporting that can be relied on,” comments Sonia.

"We moved away from me having to remember everything to a system that enables access for all staff."

Use of Asta Teamplan

TfL uses Asta Teamplan for three main functions: resource management, reporting and then tracking the results against objectives. In day-to-day practice, this consists of:

- Resource planning: skills matching for the eight School Liaison Officers (SLOs).

- Resource allocation: Allocating of SLOs to training projects.

- Activity tracking: Recording how many times an officer visits a school to see level of activity.

- School history tracking: Track the history of what has happened in the school – if there seems to be problems with transport safety at the main school, they look at feeder schools and thus target the children when they are younger.

- School liaison tracking: Tracking visit confirmation details with schools, which helps to automate/streamline existing processes.

- Resource traking - Tracking physical resources such as projectors, laptops, trailers which are booked in and out using Asta Teamplan.

- Reporting: Recording which year group was trained, how many children were trained and in which borough so they can see how they are doing against targets.

Overall, while TfL knew what they wanted to achieve and had the manual processes in place, it needed a way of automating and centralising them. “We needed a way to document and formalise processes down to a great level of detail and Asta Teamplan can easily handle it. So we moved away from me having to remember everything to a system that enables access for all staff. In addition, using Asta Teamplan ensures we can scale up in future as required,” comments Sonia.