Recent news from across the country has shown that the trend in shared services has quietly continued to expand and evolve.
In Michigan, the financial collapse of Inkster and Buena Vista school districts mandated the consolidation of services due to the dissolution of the districts. The Watkins Glen and Odessa-Montour will share transportation services in New York. Upper Dublin and Springfield school districts in Pennsylvania are sharing a transportation manager and attempting to expand the use of additional resources within transportation. In Illinois, the Northwest Suburban Special Education Organization is a cooperative serving special needs students from eight school districts around Chicago through the use of a shared bus contractor.
The scope and options of shared services is one of the few areas of transportation management that is nearly unlimited in its potential scope. A final example for consideration is a recent Request for Proposals from the Town of Concord, Massachusetts seeking opportunities for the town and school district to collaborate. As school districts continue to search for both efficiencies and financial savings an expanded view of sharing across a wide variety of government agencies can greatly expand the options available.
What is so interesting and unique about these different initiatives is that they represent a full range of the possibilities available to districts when they try to share. Regular education and special needs services, departmental management and full blown operational consolidation are all represented by these shared services efforts. Across the efforts there are peer-to-peer sharing efforts and multi-district efforts. The possibility of addressing a wide range of concerns across a broad range of district sizes and geographic regions demonstrates how shared services can be a type of duct tape for transportation problems.
The origin of the use of shared services for all of these participants was in some way financial. Even in the instance of the Michigan districts that were dissolved, a core issue was financial. However, what is so unique is that despite that same point of origin the choice of the response was customized to each individual condition. It is this fact that is most critical lesson of shared transportation: shared services is not a binary decision of consolidation or not. Shared services can be customized and structured to address the unique concerns of individual districts.
Shared services is clearly not duct tape (nothing ever will be!), but it is an increasingly prominent and useful tool for transportation managers. Thinking through all the functions of a department and how collaboration can improve the efficiency and/or effectiveness of service delivery will identify a myriad of opportunities for sharing. In determining how best to apply a shared services model, it is critical to accomplish two often divergent goals. The first goal is to determine what model of sharing offers the maximum possible benefit. The second goal is to appropriately limit the implementation of the model to mitigate risk. While this may initially seem counterintuitive, it recognizes that many public sector organization do not reward innovation and often harshly punish failure. Therefore, in order to receive the financial and operational benefits of shared services a deliberate and incremental effort can be highly effective.
Tim Ammon is a consultant with Management Partnership Services, Inc., in Rockville, Md., and is a regular presenter at the STN EXPO Conference. He has extensive experience in system implementation and use and evaluating school bus routes and schedules and has analyzed all aspects of transportation and fleet management operations. Ammon also assists in the specification and implementation of transportation software applications.
