5 Ways to Elevate Your Project Management Process in 2025 

While no one can predict the future with 100% accuracy, we can make an educated guess on what will happen in 2025 in the construction industry.   

For the next year and beyond, we anticipate that construction project complexity will continue to increase, especially with the on-going labor crunch and supply chain uncertainty. Furthermore, teams are faced with more exact and demanding project schedules that leave them with less time to plan during preconstruction. And thanks to a recent KPMG survey, we also know that the majority of owners (87%) report that their projects are coming under greater scrutiny.   

So, what’s the key to managing increased stakeholder involvement and logistical challenges? It starts with efficient project management processes.   

Think of yourself as an orchestra conductor who brings together various moving parts and ensures everything works in perfect harmony. If one thing falls out of alignment, it can disrupt the entire project and lead to delays, increased costs, potential safety hazards, and increased pressure from clients.   

With this in mind, let's shed light on best practices and tools that can help you keep all the balls in the air as well as level up your project management game in 2025 and beyond. These strategies and resources will enable you to more proactively manage project complexity and potential issues, ensuring the successful completion of your construction projects.   

1. Prioritize centralized communication  

Teams that coordinate projects across various communication channels (e.g., email, phone conversations, chat, and sticky notes on desks) are not setting themselves up for success in 2025. When your communication is all over the place, it’s easy for critical information to be overlooked or lost. Without a shared place to store and access communication, you risk losing historical records completely after project completion or if someone leaves the company.  

Not to mention, the growing emphasis on remote and hybrid work means stakeholders need a central and accessible platform to collaborate.   

That’s why the first step to successful project management is ensuring all communications occur in a centralized platform. Doing so speeds up the flow and frequency of information, enhances transparency between team members, and improves decision-making.  

Additionally, a centralized system enables you to maintain a record of all communications so teams can retrieve information and track decision-making processes throughout a project—and beyond.   

With Correspondence in Autodesk Build and BIM Collaborate, teams have a dedicated tool to manage all project communication. Correspondence allows you to:  

• Centralize project communication and reduce data loss. With flexible control, you can create, import, and organize internal and external communications directly from the platform. Correspondence reduces double-entry, so there’s less chance of errors and information loss.   

• Connect your construction workflows. Link correspondence to relevant project information, including Files, Issues, RFIs, and more, so you’re no longer switching between programs.   

• Organize and access project information. Maintain access to current and past project communication. Group, sort, filter, and search correspondence to quickly find what you’re looking for – so you can spend less time digging through conversations and more time taking action.   

• Control correspondence visibility. Easily set permissions on correspondence to ensure the right level of visibility.  

• Unrestricted and open-ended communication. Communicate freely with both internal teams and outside stakeholders  

Learn more about Correspondence.   

2. Navigate schedule complexity  

Construction project schedules are notoriously complex. From milestone due dates to material deliveries, each element has its own timeline that must be coordinated and integrated into the overall schedule.  

Projects involve multiple events and activities—many of which may take place at the same time. Without proper planning, you can run into delays, safety issues, or contractual issues.  

As such, you need to have a central source of key dates, deadlines, and more. This is where Schedule in Autodesk Build comes in. This tool gives you and your teams a central source for the project schedule so you can:  

• Share the construction schedule instantly, keeping stakeholders in the loop. Plus thanks to our web and mobile-friendly views, teams can access the schedule in the field, office, or wherever they work.   

• Collaboratively build detailed work plans and manage handoffs and roadblocks, all while viewing progress in the context of the long-term schedule. Workplan in the Schedule tool is highly flexible, allowing teams to create both independent or connected work plans.  

• Connect the schedule to the entire project by linking Schedule activities to Files, Photos, Issues, Sheets and Assets. This capability enhances the integration and visibility of project components, which helps you coordinate various activities.   

• Suggest edits. When changes happen in the field, teams can suggest updates to the schedule that are instantly shared with HQ so they can update the new schedule. Teams can adapt and act quickly, reducing delays.   

• Compare versions.  When new schedule versions are issued, finding the updates can be like finding a needle in the haystack. With version compare, you can compare multiple versions of the schedule to understand what changed instantly.   

Learn more about Schedule.  

3. Keep everyone on the same page  

Project teams consist of different stakeholders, each with their own responsibilities. Delivering a quality project on time and within budget means keeping everyone working towards the same end goal – and adjusting based on changes along the way. This is why high-performing teams have frequent and impactful check-ins to ensure everyone stays aligned.   

That’s all well and good, but not all construction meetings are created equal. To maximize meeting productivity, attendees need to know what tasks they are responsible for to keep the project moving.   

Meetings in Autodesk Build and BIM Collaboration makes this easy. It keeps project teams aligned before, during, and after your meetings so you can:  

• Boost communication and transparency. With Meetings, all attendees can access the agenda, notes, and action items.  

• Improve follow-through. The point of action items is to get things done. Meetings help you do this with features that let you assign and track critical tasks to stakeholders.  

• Make better decisions, as a team. By connecting Meetings to other parts of the project—like RFIs, Submittals, Issues, and more—stakeholders have all the information handy to make confident and informed decisions.  

• Make it easy to stay informed. Utilize companywide templates to set how meetings are run and documented. When there are standards for how meetings minutes are documented across projects, it’s easier for teams to stay informed. 

Learn more about Meetings.  

4. Make informed and proactive decisions  

Construction project success requires you to make the right decisions at the right time. Numerous choices must be made throughout the project, and to make the right call, you need to have all relevant information available.  

The traditional RFI process can be time-consuming and cumbersome. Communication through RFIs can be disjointed, with queries and responses passing through various channels, ultimately slowing down decision-making.   

Enter RFIs in Autodesk Build, which allows teams to clarify uncertainties and make informed decisions faster. With RFIs, teams can:  

• Speed up the RFI process. You can set defaults for fields like watchers, location, due date, managers, etc. That way, the creation and submission of RFIs become more streamlined and efficient.  

• Provide all relevant context. By referencing supporting Issues, Files, Sheets, Change Orders, Forms, and more, RFIs in Autodesk Build offer a comprehensive understanding of each query by integrating related documents and data.  

• Track RFI progress and responses in one central location. Easily see which team or stakeholder has the ball in their court and the next steps.  

• Collaborate with external collaborators. Not all stakeholders may have access to Autodesk Build. In this scenario, you can assign a non-members email address to the Ball-in-court, co-reviewer and watcher roles, ensuring all stakeholders are included in the process.  

Learn more about RFIs.  

5. Prioritize construction quality control  

Quality is the foundation of a safe, reliable, and successful project; sourcing and delivering top-notch work leads to less rework, repair, and early replacements. Moreover, firms known for quality work attract better clients and higher-value contracts, and are thus more likely to thrive in any economic environment.   

One of the ways to ensure quality control is to implement solid review processes for all project materials and methods.  

With Submittals in Autodesk Build, construction teams drive quality by ensuring the project is built according to specifications. This capability lets you:  

• Verify quality and compliance effectively. Add documentation to ensure materials, products, and specifications meet your project’s specific requirements.  

• Improve communication and collaboration. Easily bring in necessary stakeholders into the review process.   

• Manage the submittal process in one place. Markup submittals, add comments, and attach relevant project references including Files, Issues, and Photos.  

Learn more about Submittals.  

Ready to streamline project management in 2025?  

Make 2025 your year to improve construction project management processes by adopting the right tools. Whether you’re looking to improve team collaboration, make better decisions, enhance the quality of projects—or all of the above—Autodesk can help.   

Our construction solution solutions enable you to build faster and smarter so you can focus on delivering top-notch projects and keep stakeholders happy.   

Learn more about Autodesk Construction Cloud and level up your construction game in 2025.