Executive Summary

‍

Facing inefficiencies with Primavera P6 and spreadsheet-based crew management, Castle Rock adopted Planera to streamline scheduling, empower field teams, and gain real-time visibility across all active projects. The result? Better coordination, increased transparency, and enhanced crew utilization—all contributing to smoother project delivery and strategic planning.

‍

Background

‍

Castle Rock Construction Company specializes in roadway and highway infrastructure projects across Colorado, including complex panel replacement operations, roundabouts, and municipal street improvements. Known for executing multi-million-dollar jobs like the 17-mile I-76 rehabilitation project, Castle Rock needed a scheduling solution that could keep up with its operational demands and collaborative workflow.

‍

Historically reliant on Primavera P6 and spreadsheets, the company found its scheduling processes siloed—updated by a handful of office staff with limited visibility for field teams. This traditional model created bottlenecks in planning and communication, particularly as crews and resources were shared across multiple concurrent projects.

‍

Challenges

‍

Castle Rock encountered several critical challenges in their legacy scheduling approach:

• Limited Accessibility: Project managers and field staff relied on updates from office personnel and external consultants who maintained schedules in P6. This created delays and reduced responsiveness on job sites.
  
  
• Complex Interface: P6 was viewed as overly complicated, limiting adoption and making it difficult for non-specialists to navigate and engage with project schedules.
  
  
• Disconnected Planning: Crew assignments were managed manually in spreadsheets, creating the risk of double-booking and inefficiencies in resource allocation across jobs.
  
  
• Static Schedules: Updating schedules for weekly lookaheads or monthly progress was time-consuming and lacked real-time integration, reducing the utility of plans in the field.
  

Solution

‍

Planera offered Castle Rock a modern, intuitive, and collaborative scheduling platform tailored for construction teams in the office and the field. The company piloted Planera on the $25M I-76 panel replacement project, replacing P6 entirely from the outset. The positive experience led Castle Rock to implement Planera company-wide across all projects.

‍

Key capabilities Castle Rock leveraged:

• Field-Friendly Lookaheads: Project managers like Nolan Downing used Planera’s Gantt view and three-week lookahead tools weekly, distributing updates for team meetings with ease.
  
  
• Collaborative Schedule Building: Castle Rock brought together project managers to jointly build project schedules in real-time using Planera’s canvas-style interface—promoting alignment and shared ownership.
  
  
• Centralized Visibility: All project stakeholders, from office staff to field leaders, had access to current schedules, updates, and forecasts in one shared platform.
  
  
• Crew Management Across Projects: With support from Planera’s team, Castle Rock linked schedules across projects to track crew assignments and avoid conflicts—eliminating the limitations of spreadsheet-based planning.
  
  

Outcome

‍

By replacing P6 and spreadsheets with Planera, Castle Rock achieved meaningful operational improvements:

• Enhanced Field Engagement: Project managers now update schedules directly and independently, ensuring greater ownership and real-time responsiveness.
  
  
• Improved Transparency: Shared visibility across teams eliminated communication gaps between the field and the office.
  
  
• Efficient Resource Planning: Linked project schedules made it easier to allocate crews strategically and avoid overbooking.
  
  
• Faster Learning Curve: Planera’s user-friendly interface enabled broader adoption and easier onboarding compared to traditional scheduling tools.
  ‍
• Better Owner Reporting: As Planera makes it easy to export schedules as XER files, this has made it simple for Castle Rock to report updates to owners that require it to share schedules in the P6 file format.
  
  

Castle Rock now uses Planera across all its infrastructure jobs—transforming scheduling from a backend function into a central, collaborative planning process that drives execution.