USACE ER 1-1-11, Project Schedules — the regulation behind the UFGS section

Most people who go looking for ER 1-1-11 arrive from the other direction. They are reading UFGS 01 32 01.00 10, the contract specification that governs project schedules on USACE construction work, and they find this Engineer Regulation named in its references. The two documents are not alternatives and they do not say the same things. ER 1-1-11 directs the agency; the UFGS section binds the contractor. That distinction is the single most useful thing to carry into a reading of it, and it explains why the regulation is so much shorter and so much less checkable than the specification it stands behind.

ER 1-1-11, Administration — Project Schedules, is issued by CECW-EC, dated 18 September 2017 on its masthead, and runs sixteen pages. Paragraph 3 states: "Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited." It carries no copyright notice, and as a work of the United States Government it is quotable in full — which is why this page quotes it rather than paraphrasing it.

A note on currency. The copy this page is read from was retrieved on 2 September 2026 from the official URL at publications.usace.army.mil. That host returns HTTP 403 to automated requests from this network, and did so again when this page was written, so whether a newer edition exists was not established. The 2017 document states on its own title page that it supersedes ER 1-1-11 dated 15 June 1995. Nothing here should be read as a claim that 2017 is the current edition; check the publications site yourself before relying on it.

A regulation is not a specification

The regulation's own first paragraph sets a precedence rule that is worth knowing before you cite it in a dispute: "If this Engineer Regulation (ER) conflicts with the Federal Acquisition Regulation or any of its supplements, they must govern over this ER." Its three references are FAR 52.236-15 (Schedules for Construction Contracts), FAR 52.249-10 (Default, Fixed-Price Construction), and UFGS 01 32 01.00 10. One small oddity for anyone quoting it carefully: the references are numbered as paragraph 4, but the body cites them as "reference 3.a" and "reference 3.b" — an internal cross-reference slip in the published text.

What the policy paragraph actually says

Paragraph 5 puts the scheduling obligation on the contractor and the monitoring obligation on the Government:

The contractor is responsible for scheduling the work and tracking progress so that the contract completion date is met. The Contracting Officer or Administrative Contracting Officer/Professional Engineer-in-Charge (ACO/AE/RE) monitors the contractor's schedule to assure compliance. If a schedule is not provided, or the schedule changes are unacceptable, the Contracting Officer or ACO/AE/RE must withhold progress payments per FAR 52.236-15(a).

On method, it is permissive where the specification is prescriptive. Bar charts "can be used to manage simple projects"; on complex work, or on "other projects with many interrelated activities", a Critical Path Method schedule "is recommended". There is no complexity threshold, no activity count, and no named software. The choice is a person's: the regulation puts it on the Chief of Construction, who is "responsible for determination the appropriate project scheduling method" — the published grammar — and "The Contracting Officer or ACO/AE/RE will accept the schedule."

Paragraph 6 describes what a project schedule is expected to contain: it "represents the sequence and interdependencies of work", a methodology "(usually CPM)" calculates early start, late start and finish dates "as well as, the float available", cost and code data are entered against activities, and "Actual progress must be entered once work commences" — actual start and finish dates, percent complete, remaining duration — so that progress payments can be calculated from it. That is a description of a statused CPM file, but it is written as policy, not as a set of tests: there is nothing in it a program could pass or fail.

Schedule management, updating, and who owns the review

Paragraph 7.b is where the regulation is most quoted. A construction schedule after award "must be contractor prepared", and must involve subcontractors and suppliers in the planning. Updating "should be performed by the contractor with Government concurrence", because the update projects early or late completion and the payment due. Paragraph 7.c requires changes and impacts to be carried into the schedule "to keep the schedule up to date", so that it reflects job progress.

Paragraph 8 is the contract administration half, and it is the part that allocates responsibility inside the agency:

• 8.a — editing the specification is mandatory. Once the Chief of Construction has settled the schedule type, "the provision of the specifications must be carefully edited for the specific job. UFGS 01 32 01.00 10 ... contains notes indicating where such editing can be done. This editing is mandatory." The bracketed notes in the UFGS text are not optional scenery; the regulation obliges someone to resolve them.
• 8.b — payment is the lever. "Progress payments must not be processed until an acceptable Project Schedule has been submitted." The schedule "must be verified as being logical and the completion dates attainable", and "Failure to enforce this requirement is highly detrimental to project management." Once accepted, the contractor must keep it up to date for job progress and logic changes.
• 8.c — SDEF is mandatory for transfer. The Appendix A format "must be specified and used to transfer contract schedule data between different contractor and Government project schedule programs."

Paragraph 9 adds three implementation actions: train Government personnel in the use and review of the schedule, naming the PROSPECT 080 course; edit the UFGS section to the job; and move data between the contractor's QCS and the Government's RMS via SDEF.

Time extensions, float and delay

The regulation says remarkably little, and a reader expecting otherwise should know that before citing it. It does not define float, does not allocate float between the parties, does not name a delay analysis method, and sets no notice period. What it has is paragraph 7.c: where the contractor is behind through its own actions, the regulation contemplates a determination of where it "must accelerate to regain the schedule"; where Government actions are in issue, the impact and effect on the contractor may be determined "in order to provide equitable adjustments to the contract time"; and the two parties "should review potential delays" and settle on the method for capturing the impact.

Everything operational on this subject sits in the specification instead: time extensions, time impact analysis, float ownership and recovery schedules are UFGS clauses, not ER clauses. A finding that cites ER 1-1-11 for a float rule is citing the wrong document.

Appendix A: the Standard Data Exchange Format

Twelve of the sixteen pages are the SDEF specification, and this is where almost all of the regulation's 142 occurrences of "must" live — against zero occurrences of "shall", which dates the drafting convention neatly. SDEF is "a nonproprietary protocol to exchange project planning and progress data between scheduling systems", and it is a fixed-column ASCII file, not a database export: "The data file must consist of a 132 character, [fixed] format, 'ASCII' file. Text must be left-justified and numbers must be right-justified in each field. ... The file must not contain blank lines."

Records appear in a mandatory sequence, one type per line:

Several of its provisions are narrower than P6 and worth knowing when a schedule is exported to it. Relationship types are restricted to three — start-to-start, finish-to-finish and finish-to-start — and negative lag is discouraged: "Because these values are not supported by all other systems, it is recommended that values be restricted to zero and positive integers." Only two constraint types are defined, an early-start replacement and a late-finish replacement. Activity IDs are ten integers, descriptions thirty characters, and durations three digits. Level-of-effort work appears as a Hammock Code field, described as "level of effort in P6".

The PROG record notes carry the four statusing propositions the format is strictest about: an actual start "must be the same as, or later than, the project start date" and "the same as, or prior to, the data date"; "If the remaining duration of an activity is zero, then there must be an actual finish date"; "Activities that have not started must have a remaining duration equal to their original duration"; and completed activities carry a zero remaining duration. Read carefully, these are rules about which columns of a 132-character record may be blank — not general propositions about a P6 file — and this project reads them that way.

One caution about quotation. The text this page reads is a text layer obtained through a reader proxy rather than a locally extracted PDF, and it carries OCR-style corruptions — "freed format" for FIXED, "ten (I0) integers" where the digit is a 1. Where those words fall inside a quotation above they are bracketed or avoided. Verify any quotation against the PDF before putting it in a submission.

What ER 1-1-11 does not cover

Stated plainly, because the gaps matter more than the content for most readers: no submission deadlines, no activity duration limits, no open-ended-logic rule, no constraint prohibitions, no narrative content list, no out-of-sequence treatment, no retained-logic requirement, no P6 settings, no weather methodology, no float allocation, and no delay method. Every one of those is in the UFGS section. The regulation's contribution is the policy frame — who decides the method, who accepts the schedule, what happens to payment if none is accepted, and the obligation to edit the specification before it goes into a contract.

What this project does with it

This project imports a schedule file and reports what it contains, citing the clause behind every finding. The UFGS section is implemented as a rule pack because its clauses are predicates over a file. ER 1-1-11 is not, and no rule pack is built from it: its body directs agency personnel, and its Appendix A directs the construction of an SDEF file, which is not the format this engine reads. Where a reader needs a USACE finding, it is cited to the UFGS clause that states the requirement in checkable form.

Nothing here is a determination of acceptability, entitlement or delay responsibility — the reviewing authority determines those, and this project refuses to. See what the tool does not do and how findings are laid out.

Related: UFGS 01 32 01.00 10, clause by clause · the state DOT comparison · the standards crosswalk · GAO's Schedule Assessment Guide · schedule file formats · baseline schedule submission · is this real? · glossary.

Source: web/pages/usace-er-1-1-11.md. Source commit date: 2026-09-11.