How nPlan Helps Transit Agencies Meet the FTA’s New Guidelines

In January 2025, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) released its updated Project & Construction Management Guidelines (PCMG), a comprehensive playbook for delivering federally funded transit capital projects.

Alongside the core guidelines, the FTA’s Project Management Oversight (PMO) procedures - including OP-26, OP-33, OP-34, OP-40, and OP-54 - set a clear expectation:

Risk, cost, and schedule must be managed continuously, not just at gate reviews.

For many transit agencies, that means upgrading long-standing processes and tools to handle the complexity, speed, and political visibility of today’s megaprojects. This is exactly where nPlan comes in.

The New Compliance Reality

The updated PCMG reflects lessons learned from decades of megaproject overruns:

• OP-26 - Lessons Learned: Ensure agencies capture and apply past project lessons (delays, overruns, productivity issues) to improve planning and delivery of new projects.
• OP-33 - Capital Cost Estimate Review: Ensure cost estimates are well-documented, traceable to a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), and ready for risk analysis.
• OP-34 - Project Schedule Review: Assess schedule integrity before any risk modelling (check logic, constraints, lags, and interfaces)
• OP-40 - Risk & Contingency Review: Quantify risk and set probability-based contingency using transparent, evidence-backed methods.

The message is clear: sponsors need defensible, evidence-based risk management across the entire project lifecycle.

How nPlan Aligns with the FTA’s Guidelines

nPlan transforms risk management by replacing workshop-heavy processes (often shaped by guesswork and bias) with objective, data-driven analysis. Powered by the world’s largest dataset of past project schedules, nPlan provides continually updated forecasts that show where risks are most likely to occur. This makes risk assessments not only faster, but far more accurate, defensible and actionable. Here’s how this aligns with the FTA’s oversight framework:

From Gate Reviews to Continuous Assurance

Traditionally, agencies have prepared risk analyses only at major milestones - baselines, FFGA approvals, or readiness reviews. But the FTA’s updated guidance makes clear: that’s no longer enough. Risk must be tracked and managed continuously.

With nPlan, every time an agency updates a schedule, they can immediately re-run the analysis. Schedule integrity checks and risk forecasts refresh in minutes, creating an up-to-date view of risk that evolves alongside the project. This iterative approach gives agencies a living risk picture they can rely on internally and share directly with PMOCs, helping reduce surprises and accelerate review cycles.

The Benefits for Sponsors

• PMOC-ready evidence for every oversight procedure, reducing review cycles and questions.
  
• Portfolio consistency with comparable metrics across lines, packages, and bidders.
  
• Defensible decision-making every major call on scope, contingency, or acceleration is tied to a clear risk forecast.
  
• Faster risk insight from weeks of manual work to minutes of automated analysis.

Why This Matters Now

With billions flowing from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), transit agencies are facing unprecedented delivery expectations. The FTA is raising the bar on documentation, transparency, and continuous control.

Agencies that modernize now by embedding tools like nPlan into their PMO processes will not only stay compliant, they’ll be better equipped to deliver the largest transit projects in U.S. history on time, on budget, and with fewer surprises.

If your agency is navigating a PMOC review or preparing for a wave of capital delivery, now is the time to align your risk process with the FTA’s new standard. With nPlan, you can do it faster, with more confidence, and with a continuous flow of defensible evidence.