Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or GAAP are now a part of all big project management environments. These standards are what makes for things like Sarbanes Oxley and other compliance challenges. What do project managers have to know about GAAP and where they come from?

You’ve heard the expression “From little acorns big trees grow.”  The same can be said for projects.  There’s something compelling about the big project, the huge project, the significant project. There must be because almost everywhere I go, people take little projects and try to make them bigger. It might start innocently enough, the project team brainstorms in the early planning stages and a mind-mapping exercise takes the little project and gives it branches from…

What kind of PMO would you design if it could be any kind at all. What? You’re surprised that there’s more than one PMO? There are many. Here are a few of the most common examples.

Project scheduling is at its most interesting when the schedule is constrained. There are few examples of this better than a shutdown and turnaround schedule in an industrial plant. Everything you know from project management in other contexts applies here too but the project only lasts a few days with hundreds or thousands of workers descending on the plant to do the work in as short a time as possible. Here are some of the areas where shutdown project management is more tightly managed than elsewhere.