3 TIPS:DRIVING VALUE WITH DOCUMENT CONTROL
Experts from Graham Construction, Orion Group Holdings, and Sundt Construction share their expertise
REALIZING VALUE WITH IMPROVED DOCUMENT CONTROL
Every week, construction professionals commit 35% of their time to tasks that fail to move projects forward — fourteen hours a week that nearly every contributor spends searching through old project documents, addressing rework, navigating disputes, confirming information, and waiting for approvals. Productivity sinks like these inflate costs and make it harder for organizations to maximize the value of their efforts. Industry leaders recognize the slow erosion of their bottom line and have taken action to minimize those losses. By converting the document control experience from a manual, static process into a dynamic and integrated strategic center, teams worldwide have improved their communication, reduced approvals, and lessened the impact of project rework. InEight Chief Product Officer Brad Barth spoke with industry leaders from Graham Construction, Orion Group Holdings, and Sundt Construction for their advice on improving document control and how contractors can continue to grow and differentiate themselves in a crowded construction market.
EXPERT PANEL:
MICHELLE ORIZZONTE
Corporate Document Control Manager, Graham Construction
After over a decade of on-site project management experience, Michelle has spearheaded Graham's document management practices for the past five years. She guides a team of regional document control leads and is dedicated to streamlining processes and prioritizing standardization and efficiency in Graham's documentation workflows. With technology like InEight Document, her team aims to foster collaboration and minimize risks across all Graham's projects.
CURTIS SMITH
Project Controls Manager, Sundt Construction
After a successful military career specializing in heavy equipment and infrastructure, Curtis joined Sundt in 2013. He currently leads front-line support for all project functions. In his role, Curtis provides insights into potential challenges that lead to proactive risk management across the organization. Curtis also supports the implementation and training of a comprehensive project management solution focusing on document control.
CHRIS PERRIN
Vice President of Project Services, Orion Group Holdings
Chris has held various project controls positions in the engineering and construction industry across the two decades, supporting up to $1 billion in project value. For the last 8 years, he's provided corporate-level support and guidance to Orion's project controls resources and processes, including cost control, planning and scheduling, risk management, change management, and document control.
THE COMPAINES:
GRAHAM CONSTRUCTION
Graham is an employee-owned construction solutions partner that provides general contracting, design-build, construction management, and P3 services to the buildings, industrial, and infrastructure sectors. With over nine decades of experience, Graham undertakes projects of every scope, scale, and complexity.
SUNDT CONSTRUCTION
Sundt Construction, Inc. is one of the country's most respected general contractors, currently ranked in ENR's top 100 largest construction companies in the United States. Sundt is a full-service building contractor with expertise that spans the entire construction lifecycle.
ORION GROUP HOLDINGS
Orion is a specialty construction company offering marine, concrete, and engineering & consulting services across the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean. Orion provides a single source for construction and engineering services on and off the water.
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TIP #1: STANDARDIZE DOCUMENT CONTROL EARLY
There's a notable difference between a $10 million project and a billion-dollar megaproject. However, no matter the scale, the fundamental truths of document control stay the same. Documents need to be well organized and accessible. Handoff needs to be clean and efficient. Resources and time must be well managed and diligently logged. The difference is that smaller projects have more wiggle room for more relaxed document control practices because there are fewer documents and fewer eyes monitoring the outcome. Just because a project's value leans closer to seven figures than ten doesn't give contributors free rein to manage documents as they wish. "When you have a small project, you can have [documents] on the dashboard of your truck and in emails and on an Excel spreadsheet. You can get away with it," Graham's Michelle Orizzonte explains. "If you make mistakes at the beginning of a large-scale project, it has larger consequences. Just because you can get away with something on a small project doesn't mean you should." Consider the teams that are most likely working on these projects — organizations frequently give low-risk projects to their newest employees. Therefore, the habits and practices new talent forms early in their career become the habits and practices they take to higher budget projects.
“What's funny about our industry is that you could have a job that's a million dollars and a job that's a billion dollars. The document management process is still as complicated on a million-dollar job as it is on a billion-dollar job. You still have to do all the same things.”
-Curtis Smith, Project Controls Manager, Sundt Construction
Instead of taking a project-to-project approach to document control, teams ought to standardize their processes so that new teams don't pick up bad document habits and, instead, can master those same skills in a lower-risk environment and quickly acclimate to larger projects. When teams refine their processes early in their career, they position the entire organization for success by reducing the need for new training, limiting mistakes, and improving their overall outcomes. According to Sundt's Curtis Smith, "Each job is going to be unique, but having those controls and having standardization has really helped us scale our work so we can go to the next job and people are trained and understand what they're doing so it's not a big change every time they go to another job." To take standardization a step further, when organizations run every project through an identical process, it empowers decision-makers to collect cleaner, more reliable data throughout the project lifecycle and, in turn, convert data into actionable learnings. By keeping track of variables such as drawing iterations or types of RFIs received, teams can gather key insights that will help to offset future challenges.
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TIP #2: INVEST IN CONSTRUCTION-FOCUSED DOCUMENT CONTROL
Specialized document control solutions built with capital construction in mind have features and an overall architecture that reflect the ins and outs of the modern construction processes. Construction-focused solutions automate tagging, consolidate assets, reduce rework, and improve the auditing process in a way that not only aligns with how projects get done but integrates with the industry's existing legacy systems and applications. "We can standardize our document control processes because we have an application like InEight that we have built into our standard operating procedure," explains Orion's Chris Perrin, "but we're still able to take advantage of some of those legacy applications that our folks and stakeholders are comfortable with." For example, by integrating with tools like Outlook and SharePoint, teams can transform their existing workflows while still meeting the needs of users.
“With InEight Document, your internal process becomes the star. You don't have to mold yourself to another piece of software. The software will mold itself to your process. It's just so important that you understand your process. Tools can change. It's just a tool. But, having a strong set of standards and processes as a company and following those, that's top for me. And this tool, InEight Document, is very flexible and allows that process to be the star.”
-Michelle Orizzonte, Corporate Document Control Manager, Graham
By choosing a specialized solution, teams have greater control over the detailed practices of document control. Most general solutions provide a rigid set of parameters for each project. Specialized solutions give document controllers and other project managers the flexibility to adapt each template and workflow to the needs of each opportunity. Beyond flexibility, specialized solutions offer a level of visibility unparalleled by more generic tools. At any point, teams can see who has marked up a document, seen a deliverable, or is next in line for approval. "Managing [a document] through InEight Document lets us know exactly where it's at in that workflow and ensure that we're working on the current version or that somebody's not reviewing a document that somebody else has already marked up," explains Perrin. "We're not creating confusion and chaos within our process. We can ensure that documents get pushed through that workflow and aren’t just sitting on somebody's desk because we can see where that ball landed.
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TIP #3: KEEP CONTROL OF YOUR DATA
Contractors commonly encounter owner requirements for reporting or data sharing, but it’s smart to think carefully about how to comply. It’s not unheard of for owners to insist that a project workflow follows their established working model or integrates with the software they already use. But contractors should retain control over their own project data, experts advise, even if doing so requires extra effort. Failing to do so creates new opportunities for data loss, corruption, or even theft.
“There's risk and liabilities if our data isn't in our system. Sometimes, things go south, and you don't want that data lost. So, even if the owner has their own system, we put the essential data inside our own document control system. We're trying to be a hybrid between those two things. We don't want to have our project staff do everything twice, but we don't want to put ourselves at risk by having all this important information outside our system.”
-Michelle Orizzonte, Corporate Document Control Manager, Graham
Fortunately, organizations can continue to rely on new document control technologies throughout the project while meeting owner requirements. In the case of owners with strict system requirements, redundancy is key. Organizations cannot control the stability, security, or structure of their partner's data environment. They can, however, control their own network. Organizations can bridge the gap between customer expectations and practical policy by putting essential data inside their document control system. While it's certainly bothersome to create redundancy, with its requirement for repeating specific document control tasks, the benefits of such caution quickly overcomes the risk of loss. Redundancy offers the benefit of continuing to feed project data into your own data environment for use in future projects. According to Orizzonte, "When you look a little bit forward and look at dashboards to have some visibility into your projects -- if that data is sitting outside our own tools, we're never gonna get there. We can talk about magic when it comes to software, but you can't do any magical AI or have nice dashboards if your data isn't clean and in the same spot."
Similarly, clean document repositories and unlimited licenses allow organizations to admit external stakeholders into their environment easily. For example, rather than digging through poorly organized drawings and communication logs, company lawyers can log in, follow a logical chain of naming conventions, and find the documentation they need to resolve a dispute. Instead of asking engineers to sift through a content library, auditors can access the repository and see a clear trail of decisions, RFIs, and approvals. "Because of InEight's unlimited licenses business model, we can grant those user licenses and logins to folks who otherwise wouldn't be using the tool, like an auditor, which makes the process a lot more efficient for them and a lot less laborious for my team," explains Perrin. Contractors are experts in building things to suit their needs. Why should software be any different? "One of the biggest benefits of InEight Document is the flexibility of the software," says Smith. "Now we're not beholden to another platform's specific process that they have deemed as the only way to do a thing in the system. InEight Document allows us to say, 'Well, we don't really want to do it that way. We want to modify the workflow or the process.'"
A CONFIDENT FUTURE
As capital construction projects grow more complex and complicated, improved document controls enable organizations to create a document environment that meets their needs, understands their business, and engages their customers. By standardizing accessible, construction-focused document control tools throughout the organization, teams put their best foot toward reducing rework, expediting approvals, and ultimately improving profitability.
ABOUT INEIGHT
InEight is a leader in construction project controls software, empowering over 850 companies taking on challenging projects in industries including construction and engineering; transportation infrastructure; mining; water; power and renewables; and oil, gas and chemical. Uniquely suited to capital construction and other complex work, our integrated, modular software manages projects worth over $1 trillion globally, taking control of project information management, costs, schedules, contracts, and construction operations, and delivering insights with advanced analytics and AI. InEight's solutions adapt and scale to meet the dynamic needs of modern construction, driving operational excellence and successful project outcomes. For more information, follow InEight on LinkedIn or visit InEight.com. © 2026 InEight, Inc. All Rights Reserved