Every week, state transportation departments across the country lose thousands of hours to a problem most drivers never see. Engineers and contractors spread construction drawings across conference tables, mark changes by hand, then wait days for revised versions to come back through email. At the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, this process was taking three weeks per review cycle and delaying highway work that affected public safety and traffic flow.
The Federal Highway Administration manages nearly 250,000 miles of state highways and bridges, and coordination problems during design and construction account for about 30 per cent of project delays. Most agencies were still working with paper as recently as 2019. A bridge rehab project with 200 drawing sheets meant printing complete sets for every reviewer, gathering everyone in one room, then typing up handwritten comments afterwards. When contractors, consultants, and agency staff worked from different offices, the whole thing fell apart.
Deepak Chanda joined MassDOT's Project Controls Division when these problems were becoming impossible to ignore. The agency was running major projects at the same time, Route 79, the Braga Bridge, sections of I-95 near Fall River, and the Longfellow Bridge in Boston. All of them needed faster approvals to keep construction moving and reduce how long the public dealt with detours and lane closures. He saw that the real issue wasn't the number of drawings. It was the process everyone was stuck using.
Linking tools that were already there
He didn't try to replace everything. He connected two systems that the agency already had. One was Bluebeam, which some engineering teams already used. The other was the document storage system running across the agency. His approach: let multiple people mark up the same digital drawing at the same time, then save all those changes back to one spot that tracks every version and every edit.
He started by setting up custom profiles in Bluebeam for MassDOT. These profiles standardised everything: the symbols for markups, how comments were categorised, and what the status flags meant. When a structural engineer from a major consultant marked something as "approved with comments" and a traffic specialist from another firm flagged a signage problem, both used the same format. Everything tracked the same data.
Next, he built the connection to the document storage system. Engineers could open a 150-page highway plan directly from storage, mark it up in Bluebeam's live collaboration mode, then push the updated version back. No saving local copies. No manual file uploads. That stopped people from accidentally working on old versions.
The hardest part was automating document control. He wrote scripts that handled naming and version tracking. Every time someone revised a drawing, the system assigned it a number tied to the original file. Nobody had to guess if they were looking at Revision C or Revision D anymore. The system just showed you the current one.
Training took three months. He ran sessions for Project Controls staff, field engineers, and consultants. He walked everyone through it: open a shop drawing from storage, join a live session with five other reviewers, add comments with status tags, then upload the final version. Within three months, 90 per cent of users had switched over, tracked through usage logs.
Results on real projects
The time savings appeared quickly. Design reviews that took ten to fifteen business days, because different groups waited their turn, dropped to four or five days when everyone reviewed at once. On the AETS Highway and Boston Avenue projects, that meant issuing final construction drawings two to four days earlier for each package.
Shop drawings and Requests for Information improved even more. Contractors used to wait ten days for answers while paper documents moved between MassDOT's office, design consultants, and field supervisors. With real-time markup and instant notifications, the wait dropped to four or five days. Faster answers meant contractors could order materials and start field work without crews sitting idle. That cut labour costs and kept schedules on track.
Meetings got lighter. Weekly 90-minute design-construction coordination sessions weren't needed anymore because teams caught and fixed problems through digital markups as they happened. The weekly sessions became bi-weekly 45-minute check-ins for exceptions only. Eliminating two or three rounds of approval emails per submittal cuts total review time in half.
Accuracy improved because the system tracked everything. Every markup showed who made it, when they added it, and its status pending, addressed, or closed. That reduced miscommunication between field engineers and contractors, which usually causes rework on-site. MassDOT documented a 30 per cent drop in rework after the rollout. They also stopped having "wrong revision" mistakes, where someone builds based on an outdated plan. After deployment, that number hit zero.
Several pilot projects started construction one to two weeks earlier than they would have under the old system. For bridge work, that mattered to the public. It lets MassDOT plan detours more carefully and reduce the time lanes are closed in busy areas.
"What changed wasn't just the software," Deepak Chanda said. "We changed how people worked together. Instead of passing files from one person to the next, everyone solved problems at the same time. Instead of informal notes that might get lost, everything had structure you could trace later."
A path other agencies can follow
What happened at MassDOT fits a pattern playing out nationally. Research from the Transportation Research Board shows agencies moving to digital document workflows typically cut review cycles by 40 to 50 per cent. But many state DOTs still use hybrid paper-digital systems because connecting new tools to old platforms is hard. That gap widened after 2020, when remote work pushed some agencies to speed up digital shifts while others struggled with infrastructure that couldn't handle it.
What he built gives other agencies a model to follow. He worked with the document storage system already in place instead of making MassDOT buy and learn something completely new. That kept costs down and reduced pushback from staff used to the old way. Standardised profiles and automatic version control fixed the two things that usually make digital collaboration fail: people using different markup styles and accidentally creating duplicate files.
The compliance side matters too. Transportation projects involve federal money, environmental permits, and audits that stretch over years. The way the Bluebeam tags metadata, combined with how the storage system handles retention policies, gave MassDOT a complete record of every design decision. Who approved what change, when they approved it, and which version of the drawings they looked at. That audit trail satisfies oversight requirements. It also protects the agency if there's a dispute about scope changes or construction claims.
Infrastructure agencies deal with ageing roads and bridges, tight budgets, and public pressure to finish projects faster. Being able to speed up reviews without making mistakes becomes a real edge. What MassDOT did shows digital tools can deliver that, but only if someone takes the time to integrate them properly into how people actually work and helps the team through the change.
"What matters isn't whether the technology does what it's supposed to do," Deepak Chanda said. "It's whether people using it every day find it easier than what they were doing before. If your digital process makes things harder, people will find ways around it and you'll end up back with email attachments and printed markups."
For highway agencies still trying to move away from paper, the focus on making it work for users might be the most useful lesson from what happened in Massachusetts.
