Multi-Cycle Calls: How to Run an Annual Solicitation Without Starting from Scratch Every Year

Ask any MPO planner what time of year they dread most, and a lot of them will tell you it’s call for projects season. Not because the work isn’t meaningful — it is — but because so much of it feels like reinvention. New spreadsheet. New folder structure. New email chain trying to track who submitted what. Same questions you asked last year, re-typed into a new form. Same follow-up calls to sponsors who can’t find the attachment they uploaded three weeks ago.

If that sounds familiar, the problem isn’t your process. It’s that your tools weren’t built for a recurring workflow.

The annual cycle is predictable. Your system should be too.

A call for projects isn’t a one-time event — it’s a recurring institutional responsibility, often tied to a fixed programming cycle, federal deadlines, and TIP amendment windows that don’t move. The work repeats. The sponsors repeat. The data you need repeats. What doesn’t need to repeat is the setup.

When your submission process lives in a true system of record — rather than a collection of email attachments, shared drives, and spreadsheet trackers — you’re not starting from scratch each year. You’re opening a new cycle on top of an existing foundation. Past submissions are still there. Sponsors who applied before can reuse and update their applications rather than rebuilding them. The questions you refined last cycle carry forward. The institutional knowledge doesn’t walk out the door when someone retires or moves on.

ProjectTracker is built for exactly this kind of recurring workflow. Calls for projects run on annual or multi-cycle schedules within the same system, so each new solicitation builds on the last rather than replacing it.

When a project is selected, it shouldn’t have to be re-entered

Here’s a moment that happens in every programming cycle: a project gets selected, and someone has to take the information from the application and enter it into the TIP system. By hand. Again.

This is where duplicate data entry costs you real time and introduces real errors. The project name gets shortened. The termini get transcribed slightly differently. The cost estimate from the application doesn’t quite match what ends up in the financial constraint table. Small discrepancies that create big reconciliation problems later.

In ProjectTracker, selected submissions push directly into funded projects with no re-entry required. The application data becomes the project record. And because the original submission stays attached to the project throughout its life in the TIP, you always have access to what the sponsor originally proposed — the stated purpose, the scope, the cost basis. When a project comes back for an amendment two years later and someone asks why it was programmed the way it was, the answer is right there.

The form should flex to the funding opportunity — not the other way around

Not every call for projects is the same. A Surface Transportation Block Grant solicitation has different eligibility requirements than a Transportation Alternatives set-aside. A highway resurfacing program asks different questions than a transit capital call. When your submission form is a static document — a Word template or a PDF — accommodating those differences means maintaining multiple versions, which means more opportunities for the wrong form to end up in the wrong sponsor’s hands.

ProjectTracker lets you configure submission questions by funding opportunity. Each call gets the form it actually needs. Scoring criteria can be customized by funding stream so that evaluations reflect the specific goals of each program. You can filter and compare projects by score, geography, work type, or funding request — within a cycle or across cycles — without building a new spreadsheet to do it.

Attachments: the part nobody talks about until something goes wrong

Every project submission comes with documents. Concurrence letters. Preliminary cost estimates. Design plans. Environmental clearances. Right-of-way certifications. Photos of the failing culvert that makes the case better than any written description could.

In a folder-based system, these live somewhere — if you’re lucky, somewhere consistent, with a naming convention that the person who created it remembers. When you need to find a specific attachment six months after submission, you’re either searching through a shared drive or emailing the person who set up the folder and hoping they still work there.

ProjectTracker’s attachments feature keeps every document filed directly within the project it belongs to. Request letters, design plans, agency concurrence, photos — all of it is retrievable from the same place you go to look at the application or the selected project. No folders to navigate. No naming conventions to remember. No wondering whether the file you’re looking at is the final version or a draft from March. When someone other than the original submitter needs to find something, they can find it — without asking anyone for help.

The annual call for projects doesn’t have to feel like a production. With the right system, it feels like a workflow — one that gets smoother each year because the work you did last year is still there, still useful, and still connected to everything that came after it.

That’s what ProjectTracker is built to do.