How do you evaluate the impact and value of signalling innovations for your stakeholders and customers?

In my experience, the objectives are something that we plan to achieve or goal of our efforts and actions. We have short term objectives and mid-term. By defining our objectives, this step will help us to align our signalling innovation with our strategy, and we need to remember that defining objectives requires time, patience especially for railway signalling scope..

o innovate effectively, pinpoint signals to send or receive and determine clear encoding/decoding methods. Define key messages and information for credibility. Select channels based on reach, frequency, and feedback, aligning with objectives and audience preferences. This strategic identification of signals and channels ensures successful design and implementation of your signalling innovation.

After implementing your signalling innovation, gather data through surveys, interviews, analytics, or experiments. Analyze the data to assess outcomes like awareness, engagement, satisfaction, loyalty, or conversion. Interpret results by comparing against objectives, expectations, or competitors. This data-driven approach enables a comprehensive evaluation, allowing you to measure and understand the performance and impact of your signalling innovation.

In my role as Director of Project Management for DB Engineering & Consulting GmbH's Railway Design unit, overseeing projects like the Digital Node Stuttgart, post-launch evaluation of signalling innovations is critical. From my experience, effective data collection involves surveys, interviews, and analytics. These methods provide insights from stakeholders and quantitative metrics for a comprehensive assessment.

Communicate and act the results is most important step in the process, as we invest our efforts and time by completing the surveys, meetings, interviews with client, stakeholders, engineering, design, interface teams and partners to collect and understand the requirements to avoid any misunderstanding of the solutions and expectations. So will be fair and right to share all the results at the end and to show what are pending points if any.