Chasse Raises The Bar On Construction Project Planning

For fast-growing contractors, scheduling is no longer just a project-management exercise; it is a critical business function tied directly to risk management, operational visibility, accountability, and project execution.

For Chasse Building Team, finding a scheduling platform that could support both highly complex projects and everyday field operations became a strategic priority. That search led the company to Asta Powerproject.

Today, Chasse uses Powerproject as more than a scheduling tool. The platform has become the foundation of a company-wide initiative to improve scheduling literacy, standardize best practices, strengthen collaboration, and provide greater visibility into project performance across the organization.

Balancing Sophistication with Simplicity

Chasse operates across a wide range of markets, including higher education, municipal, commercial, and Native JV projects. The company completed more than 600 projects last year totaling approximately $750 million, ranging from small municipal job-order contracts to large, complex projects exceeding $200 million.

According to Chris Quigley, General Superintendent at Chasse, the company needed a scheduling platform that could scale across that diversity without overwhelming users.

“We wanted something sophisticated enough to protect risk and manage complex projects, but still intuitive enough for people to actually use,” said Quigley. “Powerproject gave us that balance.”

One of the biggest challenges Chasse faced was the industry-wide gap in scheduling expertise among field personnel. The company recognized that scheduling success depended not only on software capabilities but also on making scheduling approachable for superintendents and project teams.

Rather than overwhelming teams with advanced scheduling concepts from the start, Chasse focused on building practical competency around a core set of best practices.

“If we could teach everybody five key things and get them doing those consistently, we could move from 20% industry-standard performance to 80% almost overnight,” Quigley explained.

Historically, Chasse used one of the popular scheduling platforms, but the company found that schedules were often created differently from one project to another, limiting consistency and visibility.

Over the past two years, Chasse has significantly expanded and standardized its use of Powerproject, creating internal best practices, customized workflows, and structured training programs tailored to different user levels throughout the organization.

The company developed an internal intranet hub containing:

• Best-practice documentation
• Step-by-step training materials
• Customized workflows
• Video tutorials
• User-level training paths ranging from introductory to advanced scheduling instruction

Importantly, Chasse deliberately avoided a “top-down mandate” approach to adoption.

“We wanted people to understand why we were doing this,” said Quigley. “Powerproject helped because it’s user friendly and intuitive. People could see the value quickly instead of feeling like software was being forced on them.”

That strategy helped improve buy-in across field and office teams alike.

Improving Visibility with Asta Vision

About a year ago, Chasse added Asta Vision to further expand organizational visibility and collaboration. Vision centralized schedule access and enabled teams across the organization – from operations and preconstruction to executive leadership – to access project information without relying on individual schedulers or local files.

“What Vision really brought us was transparency and accountability,” Quigley said. “People know the schedules are visible, they know leadership is engaged, and they know we’re all working from the same information.”

The platform also improved collaboration between departments. Preconstruction teams can now access schedules directly, executives can review project status in real time, and operational teams can collaborate without constantly requesting updated files from project personnel.

For Chasse, one of the most important goals was ensuring that schedule data was accurate and trustworthy.

“A schedule shouldn’t be a wish list,” Quigley explained. “We want realistic, accurate information, whether the news is good or bad.”

To support that objective, Chasse integrated schedule health-checking processes using schedule validation tools and customized Powerproject views. These tools help teams quickly identify issues such as:

• Open predecessors or successors
• Excessive activity durations
• Improper constraints
• Calendar inconsistencies
• Incomplete logic relationships

The company established internal benchmarks, including targets for keeping schedule activities under 15 days whenever possible to improve visibility into project progress and sequencing. The organization also uses logic validation to ensure downstream activities accurately reflect field realities.

“If drywall installation slips, for example, the schedule needs to reflect how that impacts taping and downstream trades,” said Quigley. “Otherwise, you end up with bad data that creates a false sense of progress.”

These processes have helped Chasse create schedules that are more dynamic, more actionable, and more aligned with actual project execution.

Supporting Projects of Increasing Complexity

As Chasse continues to grow, Powerproject has become increasingly valuable on large, phased projects involving multiple zones, multiple crews, and overlapping trade activities. For example, the company recently began work on a $300-million high school project involving multiple simultaneous work areas and coordinated trade sequencing.

Quigley said features such as Path to Task have proven especially valuable for helping teams understand schedule impacts and critical sequencing relationships on large-scale projects. The company is also beginning to develop market-specific schedule templates tailored to various project types, including Job Order Contracting (JOC), multifamily, and podium-style construction.

Although quantifying exact ROI from scheduling initiatives can be difficult, Chasse has already seen measurable operational benefits. According to Quigley, early planning and schedule analysis recently helped the company identify and avoid a potential $250,000 project issue before it escalated.

“That one issue alone justified a significant portion of the investment we’ve made into scheduling and planning,” he said.

Beyond cost avoidance, Chasse has also improved labor planning, work-density analysis, production tracking, and coordination across teams and trades. Chasse is now also exploring ways to integrate Powerproject and Vision data into enterprise-level dashboards using Microsoft Power BI. The goal is to create centralized executive dashboards that combine scheduling, operational, compliance, and risk-management information into a single, organization-wide view.

“We’re trying to create one place where leadership can quickly understand what’s happening across the organization,” Quigley said. “Scheduling data is becoming a much bigger part of that conversation.”

For Chasse, the biggest success may not simply be implementing new software; it is building a culture where scheduling is understood as a strategic tool for project success.

“We focus heavily on the ‘why,’” Quigley said. “When people understand why scheduling matters and how it helps them succeed, that’s when you start getting real commitment and long-term adoption.”