Highways Agency - Safe roads, Reliable journeys, Informed travellers

The process guidance has three parts, comprising:

• The CAT3 roadmap (see below)
• An outline description of the CAT3 process (see below)
• A detailed description of all of the steps in the CAT3 roadmap (811KB PDF)

The CAT roadmap

The overall CAT3 process is shown in the two-page process map and associated timeline. This has been developed from detailed feedback gathered from industry participants and CAT practitioners following the CAT1 and CAT2 programmes.

Download the CAT roadmap (214KB PDF)

Outline description of the CAT3 process

While many of the principles used in CAT1 and CAT2 have been retained, some important changes have been made. This section provides an outline of the key steps to illustrate these changes:

• Prepare Part 1 information: This covers the supplier's provision of introductory information about their company, to enable visit scheduling and to give CAT practitioners a degree of orientation. The guidance has been updated to provide greater clarity on what to include. This Part 1 information is not assessed.
• Prepare Part 2 information: In this section the company describes how it addresses each of the 24 indicators. The aim is to give the CAT practitioners as clear a picture as possible of the organisation and how it works, in order to inform their visit. This has been simplified for CAT3, and the total document is restricted to no more than 25 A4 pages. Unlike CATs1 and 2, there is no longer a requirement for companies to self-score their submission.
• Review Part 2 information: Each member of the CAT team conducts an initial review of the Part 2 information in order to identify the questions they would want to answer during the visit. The Part 2 information is not assessed or scored at this stage. The team does not begin to draw conclusions about the organisation until after the visit.
• Consolidate visit questions: The senior CAT practitioner draws the individual sets of visit questions into a single set to be reviewed and developed at the visit planning meeting.
• Peer review: At specified stages of the CAT process, every CAT team will be subjected
  to peer review. This is conducted by another senior CAT practitioner, who is not part of
  the team, and includes:
  • Reviewing progress to date
  • Checking that the process is running to plan
  • Ensuring that the assessment is of an appropriate quality
  • These reviews are focused on three key stages of the visit and are normally conducted remotely by telephone and email.
• Visit planning meetings: CAT team planning and visit scope and plan: About three weeks before the visit, companies are requested to host a planning day for the CAT team. In the morning, the CAT team will hold a private meeting to agree their visit questions, and their desired agenda, based on their individual reviews of the Part 2 information. In the afternoon, the senior CAT practitioner will meet the company's CAT champion in order to discuss the visit plan, agree the overall structure of the visit and agree as much as possible of the itinerary.
• Prepare itinerary: This is expected to be an iterative process between the CAT champion and the senior CAT practitioner
• Conduct visit: Following feedback from suppliers and CAT practitioners, the length of the visit is reverting to the three days originally used in CAT1. This enables companies to present their operations more comprehensively, and CAT practitioners to cover the ground necessary to assess them against the whole CAT framework.
• Conduct consensus meeting: As in CAT2, the consensus meeting will be held on the company's premises on the day immediately following the visit. At the end of this meeting, the CAT team will have agreed their findings from the visit, produced the contents of the draft report, and agreed the score. They will not communicate the score back to the company until after the final peer review.
• Obtain visit feedback: To help develop the CAT process, and to provide feedback on the performance of the CAT practitioners, 360° feedback will be gathered from each of the CAT practitioners and from the company CAT champion.