Institute for Transportation

About the research

With the adoption of Aurigo Masterworks software by the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT), there is benefit to revising Section 1110 Progress Scheduling of the Iowa DOT Standard Specifications for Highway and Bridge Construction and other scheduling specifications and requirements. The Masterworks Project Management software has been implemented, and the Iowa DOT has enough licenses to distribute the program to contractors and county engineers. Section 1110 of the Standard Specification for Highway and Bridge Construction describes the Progress Scheduling requirements for the contractor. Currently, the specification is written prescriptively to favor high-end project enterprise software such as Primvera P6 by Oracle. This is problematic because most contractors and the Iowa DOT do not have expertise in Primavera nor do they have site licenses. As a result, contractors often must hire scheduling consultants with expertise and access to expensive scheduling software programs and the Iowa DOT has to hire consultants to review and comment on the CPM schedules submitted by the contractor. The existing Progress Scheduling specification results in a system where most contractors and the DOT cannot even open the schedules because they don’t have licenses for the software used to create them.

In addition to revising Section 1110, other Iowa DOT specifications and requirements need to investigated and revised to support the use of the Aurigo Masterworks software on projects of different sizes and scope, not just the very large projects. All projects may benefit from some level of additional schedule detail to support management and control of the project. However, not all projects warrant the level of detail of the larger projects.