A trajectory is a tool used to predict the success of specific activities over time. Along the trajectory are interim targets that represent a system’s best estimate of progress over time towards the end target. Mapping a delivery trajectory requires connecting the individual strategies of a system to their expected impact on that target. It takes into account when each strategy will yield its results and how much each strategy will contribute toward the overall goal. A good trajectory relies on a specific metric and balances ambition with realism. Building a thoughtful trajectory allows those involved in the process of delivery to know at any given moment whether a system is on-track to meet its goals on time.
 
Context and challenge
 
After being named a second-round winner of the Race to the Top (RTTT) grant competition in 2010, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MA DESE) began working with the U.S. Education Delivery Institute (EDI) to tackle the issue of implementing their reform agenda.  The first step was to identify priority goals and to write delivery plans for each of them.  One such primary goal was college and career readiness: ensuring that all students were prepared for success after high school.
 
The department had gathered and analyzed data on past performance but had never tried to predict future rates of success with such specificity. Upon beginning their work with EDI, leaders at the MA DESE were very interested in learning about trajectories and associating them with their goals, in order to further produce progress in their state.  They felt that by using this data to be as specific as possible around expectations of future performance, they would be able to drive student achievement in their state even higher.
 
Key Actions
 
The College and Career Readiness plan enumerated seven high priority strategies to reach the goal, including increasing the number of students completing the challenging MassCore curriculum and creating an Early Warning Indicator System to identify students that are potentially off track for high school graduation. The department’s trajectory needed to spell out how each of these strategies would impact college and career readiness over time. 
 
Drawing a robust trajectory required the collaboration of many people within the MA DESE. Anna Gazos, Policy Analyst and a member of Massachusetts’s delivery unit, was given responsibility for bringing the necessary players together. She was fluent in policy, statistics, and econometrics, which was helpful given the data analysis necessary for drawing a trajectory. 
 
The first step was to calculate the baseline trajectory. Drawing a baseline trajectory answers the question: If we did nothing, what would happen to the target metric over time? This question is where analysts might take into account population growth or other factors that would increase or decrease the number of graduates regardless of actions taken by the department. For example, using data from 2006 to 2009, the MA DESE found that “the number of students graduating each year is increasing by an average of 976 students per year.” Including this growth rate in the baseline allowed the final trajectory to accurately estimate the impact of each strategy.
 
The next step was to estimate the impact of each priority strategy on the target metric.  To do this, Gazos met with the managers for each of the seven strategies to discuss exactly what they expected to happen as a result of their work and when. She needed to know the specific actions that had to be taken to ensure timely results. Gazos developed a list of probing questions to draw out the data necessary for making a trajectory and used these to guide her meetings with managers.
 
Because estimating the future is not always academically rigorous, the idea of a trajectory drew some hesitation from colleagues who were more comfortable making no estimate at all rather than making one that was not fully scientific. Gazos, however, was able to overcome the aversion of some managers by making sure everyone involved—including the Commissioner—understood that the trajectories were essentially educated guesses: they might turn out to be wrong, but they would nevertheless be useful as a way of grounding the discussion about future impact. She included an appendix to the plan that detailed the assumptions behind each estimate; this appendix could serve as a starting point for discussions about why some estimates were correct and others were not. Eventually, staff became more comfortable with the idea of predictions and her discussions with project leaders led to the creation of a strong trajectory for the College and Career Readiness Delivery Plan.
 
Results
 
The final delivery plan included an estimate for the number of additional graduates – and college and career ready graduates – that the state could expect as a result of its strategies over time to 2014. Now that Massachusetts has a solid trajectory, staff are always able to know if a project is on or off track. If it is off track, staff can immediately begin work to remedy the problem or revise the trajectory.
 
Further, as a result of the planning and trajectory exercises, the managers for the College and Career Readiness strategies at MA DESE went from having little communication with each other to engaging in more structured collaboration to address common challenges. The planning and trajectory meetings facilitated interdepartmental conversations that many people found extremely helpful. “The trajectory made certain people come together who wouldn’t normally have come together,” explained Gazos. In particular, two staff members working on the MassCore section of the CCR goal found their meetings to be so productive that they continued meeting even after Gazos had finished her initial work.  The collaborative nature of the trajectory process also opened up the relationships in the department so that people working on different programs felt comfortable challenging each other, despite sometimes stepping outside of the department hierarchy. The discussion catalyzed by the creation of the trajectory provided staff members working in different areas with a common framework within which they could exchange ideas to improve the system.
 
Finally, the trajectory conversations forced a degree of specificity about each strategy that was not necessarily there beforehand.  Spelling out the assumptions for a strategy’s impact usually requires some detail about how the strategy will impact classrooms, which classrooms, and when.  Besides contributing to the estimate, these assumptions do a great deal to advance project planning and serve as a set of interim milestones for holding managers accountable.
 
For More Information
 
Deliverology 101, Section 3B