Anyone who's worked in construction knows how critical project controls are—those guardrails that keep projects on track, on budget, and aligned with stakeholder expectations. From ironing out schedules and budgets to document control, managing these components helps reduce project risk and keeps teams on track.
Here to talk more about project controls is Emily Rech, Director of Project Controls at Pond & Company. With decades of experience in this space, Emily has a lot to say about the best practices and tools that make project controls more impactful.
Check out what she has to say.
We discuss:
Project controls are the systems and processes that guide a construction project, ensuring timelines, costs, and resources stay aligned with the plan. They provide the structure needed to track progress and even anticipate challenges.
"Project controls is how we manage risk on all of our projects because it encompasses four critical pillars—estimating, scheduling, budget management, and document controls," says Emily.
"When you have all those four things working in sync, you can manage the risk on all of your projects."
As a former project scheduler, Emily is passionate about the scheduling pillar of project controls.
"I've been doing scheduling for almost 20 years now. Every iteration of scheduling is important because it's how we get to our deliverables on time. It's how we manage risk on our projects."
While scheduling can be complex, having that level of detail and granularity is critical, as overlooking even minor details can disrupt timelines and jeopardize project success.
As she aptly puts it, "If you are missing out on detail, then you could be missing out on a major piece of the schedule that'll dictate how you're going to finish on time. And time is money, period."
Scheduling best practices
So, what goes into a great scheduling process?
According to Emily, it all starts with having a solid handle on your contracts, requirements, and deliverables. Understanding these details is a must if you want to create an accurate schedule.
Then, you'll want to develop a detailed work breakdown structure that aligns with the unique phasing of your project. Whether it's a horizontal or vertical build, defining the phases helps teams track activities and timelines accurately. The work breakdown should also connect to your cost breakdown structure, so the project has seamless budget tracking and progress management.
From there, Emily says the focus shifts to sequencing—identifying the order of activities and creating the dependencies that shape the project's flow.
"You can start developing the activities, the relationship ties, and what needs to come first, second, etc. Then, you build out your critical path."
All in all, you must tie the schedule together by integrating earned value metrics, ensuring that progress, productivity, and budgets are aligned.
"There's a lot that goes into it, but it's all about establishing how you're phasing the project, building the work breakdown structure, and tying that to progress and productivity. Scheduling is a bigger piece than most people think. It's not just time."
Biggest challenges
As with any complex process, scheduling comes with challenges. According to Emily, the biggest hurdles are finding the right people and communication.
On the people side, she points out the difficulties of finding individuals with the right mix of skills.
"Schedulers are a rare breed. I always say that there's a 'scheduling brain,' and I compare it to people who play Tetris really well and see how pieces move together when others can't see it."
"The challenge is finding people skilled at technical thinking, who know the industry and understand how projects come together."
Then, there's communication, which can easily break down between different teams and stakeholders.
"Communication is one of our biggest hurdles. It's trying to figure out how you're communicating with the engineering folks, with the people in the field, and then accurately sharing that back to the project management team and the owner to ensure everybody's tied in and onboard."
Scheduling tech stack
When it comes to Emily's scheduling tech stack, she says Primavera remains the gold standard in the industry.
"I don't think there's going to be another tool that's going to go toe-to-toe with Primavera anytime soon. It really is the right tool for doing those high-level and detailed schedules, and it's the one that's always going to hold up tried and true."
That being said, Emily adds that enhancing communication with simpler, more accessible tools is key to bridging gaps across teams.
"However, I do believe the scheduling capability in Autodesk Construction Cloud is a wonderful communication tool because it's easy. You can take the native file from Primavera, dump it into the schedule tool, and now you have something a lot easier to communicate with your field folks and with your client."
She continues, "I think there's a lot of tools now and a lot of things that we can do to help us with that communication piece, which again is the most important part of scheduling."
Get excited about 4D scheduling
Still on the topic of technology and innovation, Emily is particularly excited about 4D scheduling—i.e., the integration of time (the 4th dimension) with 3D models to visualize project progress over time.
"4D scheduling is very exciting to me, and I feel like the industry will go there more and more."
For Emily, visually linking the schedule to each phase of construction is one of the keys to driving clarity and collaboration across teams.
"4D scheduling is awesome, and it really does help communicate the schedule better. I feel like we're getting closer and closer to wider adoption as our models get better. It's great that Autodesk has these other tools that can tie things like the scheduling tool to activities."
Another key pillar of project controls is document control—the process of managing, storing, and organizing project documents to ensure accessibility and version integrity throughout the project lifecycle.
Emily, for the most part, is happy about the boom of technology and the fact that teams have more tools than ever.
Of course, this introduces some challenges as well.
"We have too many options now. We've got people sharing stuff in SharePoint, on Box.com, or Teams. And so, you've got all these different ways people share data, but true document control is having one source of truth."
"That's why my team works very hard at making sure that we know where all of our data is. Right now, we're trying to bring all of that into Docs and ACC. That way, the data is sortable, and we can then do a better project closeout because we know everything is in one place."
As an organization, Pond & Company prides itself on its culture of clear communication and transparency with clients.
Pretty much any construction pro knows that when it comes to projects, something always comes up. Executing projects isn't always straightforward. When issues arise (as they so often do), proactive communication can mean the difference between a minor hiccup and a major setback.
As Emily puts it, "The sooner you can communicate changes to all the stakeholders, the sooner you can address things. Whether it's a schedule bust, a missed scope, or whatever kind of change, things are a lot easier if you're managing all of those other risks upfront."
This brings us back to the importance of project controls, as they create the framework for identifying and addressing potential risks before they escalate.
"It comes back to being organized and having those tight constraints around your project controls. You need to manage your schedule, documents, and estimates while ensuring everything is correct and pulled together. Again, project controls are all about risk management and communication."
Digital Builder is hosted by me, Eric Thomas. Remember, new episodes of Digital Builder go live every week.
