Long-Term Bridge Performance High Priority Bridge Performance Issues

APPENDIX A-FOCUS GROUP INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Focus group interviews were conducted with individuals involved in bridge asset management at each participating State transportation department ranging from the system-wide to individual structure levels. Accordingly, a series of structured questions were used to guide the discussion and to elicit details about the perceptions, policies and practices that influence the State transportation department’s bridge management program, and perceived needs for improvement.

QUESTIONS FOR LTBP FOCUS GROUP INTERVIEWS

1. Explain your organizational structure, as it pertains to bridge management and maintenance.
   
   
2. Please review your inspection processes. Who performs inspections? Qualifications? Quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC)? Localities?
   
   
3. What sources of information are most useful to you for program-level decision support?
   
   
   1. Does your State have a formal bridge management system? Is it useful?
   2. Do you use it to just archive data or use it to make system-level decisions? And if you use it to what extent?
   3. Does the system track maintenance, repair and rehabilitation actions?
   4. Does your system capture and report cost information?
   5. What additional capabilities do you wish you had?
   
   
   
4. What sources of information are most useful to you for project-level decision support?
   
   
   1. In addition to inspection reports (NBIS) what other information do you base these decisions on?
   2. What non-structure specific data sources do you use to support project selection? (traffic data, environmental, truck data, corridor or multi-asset project planning)
   3. Do you perform element-level inspection or to what level of detail do your inspections document condition?
   4. What supplemental testing do you do? Do you use nondestructive methods? Are the NDE results maintained in a central database?
   5. Have you used health monitoring instrumentation as a supplement to your inspection program? If so, how?
   6. What data/information would help you more accurately define the extent of repairs and make your estimate better?
   7. How do you go from inspection report to a contract to get a job done?
      
      
      1. Identify problem
      2. Generate suggested methods of repair
      3. Generate costs of repairs
      4. In order to achieve efficiency, cost effectiveness, safety and minimize user impacts, what are some contracting methods you employ?
         
         
   8. Are you capturing actual repairs performed versus specified repairs? How? Do you record where the repair was actually performed?
      
      
5. What performance measures do you use to gauge the success of your bridge management system?
   
   
   1. What is the most useful information you get out of the process?
   2. How do you utilize that information in your decisionmaking process?
   3. What are the weaknesses in the data for your performance measure process?
   4. Do you monitor your bridge maintenance program for performance?
   5. If you use a system-level performance measure, can you separate the impacts of replacement construction versus maintenance on system-level performance?
   6. How do you measure the effectiveness of particular maintenance activities?
      
      
      1. What data do you have
      2. What data do you think you need?
         
         
6. We intend to pose questions to elicit the most common forms of deterioration and damage on your bridges, what information you use to evaluate the condition and what information you use to develop a feasible solution. What are the five to ten most common forms of deterioration or damage you face in maintaining, repairing or rehabilitating your bridges? )
   
   
   1. What do you consider to be the three most critical to address and why?
   2. What processes do you consider to be the causes of the deterioration or damage?
   3. What inspection and/or test data do you currently use that enables you to estimate the severity and the extent of the deterioration or damage?
   4. What parameters that you do not currently measure would improve your ability to estimate the severity and the extent of the deterioration or damage?
   5. What factors are preventing you from collecting the desired data?
   
   
   
7. We intend to pose questions to elicit the most common maintenance, repair or rehabilitation activities you perform and what information you have to base your choice of feasible solutions on. On what 5 to 10 maintenance, repair, or rehabilitation activities do you expend the most resources (time or money) to address?)
   
   
   1. What are the three most critical to address and why?
   2. What inspection and/or test data do you use that enables you to develop a feasible and economical solution?
   3. What parameters that you do not currently measure would improve your ability to develop a feasible and economical solution?
   4. What factors are preventing you from collecting the desired data?
   
   
   
8. What does long-term bridge performance mean to you? What suggestions do you have?
   
   
9. Tell us some things you’ve done in your program that you consider successes or clear improvements.