Trauner served as a Consultant Advisor for the development of a recommended AASHTO Design-Build Procurement Guide to assist state highway agencies in the design-build procurement process including the preparation of requests for qualifications and requests for proposals and the selection of the successful proposer.

The development team reviewed many guides and collected request for qualifications/request for proposal (RFQ/RFP) documents for design-build projects within and outside of the US, and within and outside the transportation industry. The team also reviewed recent research and interviewed practitioners to understand current trends, best practices, and lessons-learned for design-build procurement. The team then analyzed this information and synthesized it into a guide with sample provisions that can be adapted to a number of procurement approaches currently used for design-build in the highway industry.

The Guide addresses the entire design-build procurement process, and includes project selection criteria, risk analysis examples, and sample RFQ/RFP documents. The contents of this Guide are based upon best practices from experienced state highway agencies and other public sector agencies. The Guide uses a four step approach to writing a successful design-build RFP: 1) defining project goals, 2) allocating risk, 3) evaluation planning, and 4) writing the contract documents. While these steps may seem overly simple, these four elements, and the order in which they are performed, are critical to project success.

The Guide is intended to be flexible for varying project types, sizes, and procurement requirements. Finally, the Guide promotes a common design-build “vocabulary” for better dissemination of lessons learned and incorporation of continuous improvement.