Chicago Transit Authority Professional IT Support Services

Level-1 supported CTA with IT and project management services, standardizing systems and strengthening operations for one of the nation’s largest transit agencies.

With 1.6 million riders on an average weekday, the Chicago Transit Authority operates the second-largest public transportation system in the United States. Serving Chicago and 35 surrounding suburbs, CTA delivers more than 80 percent of the region’s public transit trips, many of them running 24 hours a day. It is the circulatory system of a six-county region connecting workers, students, families, and neighborhoods.  

Level-1 Global Solutions was brought in to support CTA’s internal transformation to shift toward a unified, standards-based approach for managing projects, systems, and information. As a subcontractor to Northbridge, we helped reconfigure the agency’s digital foundation establishing consistency across departments, aligning enterprise applications to shared standards, and implementing a project management methodology that could scale with the complexity of the agency itself.  

At the core of our engagement was the introduction of Total Lifecycle Project Management™, a structured process designed to bring clarity, accountability, and continuity to multi-phase initiatives. The aim wasn’t to optimize isolated tools but to establish a shared logic across business, IT, and operations.

What We Delivered 

• Project and program management methodology implementation 
• Requirements definition and enterprise systems engineering 
• Business process reengineering and lifecycle planning 
• Integration of disaster recovery and continuity strategies 
• Application architecture alignment and systems standardization 
• Network documentation, testing support, and customized applications 

Across each layer of engagement, Level-1’s goal was to reduce fragmentation and establish lasting standards inside one of the most complex transportation agencies in the country. Thus, making it possible for a transit authority of this size to manage risk, respond to change, and sustain performance across thousands of interdependent workflows. 

By embedding consistency at the core of CTA’s digital operations, Level-1 helped create the conditions for scale, for clarity, and for sustained coordination across people, platforms, and priorities.