Delaware DOT Specification Review and Rewrite

Delaware DOT Specification Review and Rewrite

TRAUNER was assigned three tasks under a term contract to review and rewrite DelDOT’s standard specification.

Review Division 100
TRAUNER reviewed, commented on, and suggested edits to Division 100 of DelDOT’s August 2016 Standard Specifications. TRAUNER met with DelDOT’s senior staff to discuss its recommendations, which focused on DelDOT’s changes clause, time extension clause, payment provisions, claims provisions, and related specifications. TRAUNER reviewed not only content, but also specification writing best practices, including formatting the use of the active voice and word usage. In performing its work, we also compared DelDOT’s specifications to other specifications in use by other DOT’s across the country.

Review CPM Specification
TRAUNER edited and rewrote DelDOT’s project CPM scheduling and time extension clauses. The revisions to these clauses incorporated the industry’s best practices for the development, implementation, and use schedules on projects and the industry’s best practices for preparing time extensions requests that demonstrate the project encountered critical project delays and a discussion of excusable, compensable delays; excusable, non-compensable delays; and unexcusable delays..

Review of Complete DelDOT Specification
TRAUNER edited the entire specification. The edits focused on the “5-C’s” of specification writing: edits to make the specification more Concise, more Complete, more Correct from a grammatical perspective, more Consistent, and more Clear. TRAUNER participated in meetings with the DelDOT rewrite staff. We helped DelDOT prepare revised standard specifications and helped to incorporate these revisions into its new standard specifications.