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.

HMS has released the latest version of TimeControl, 5.1.2.  As usual, the new version has a number of fixes but more interestingly, the version now supports the use of Primavera “Steps” for updating tasks.  This project updating feature lets a project manager define a number of sub-activity steps which can be progressed individually.  The summary of that progress can be used to update the progress of the task itself. Now TimeControl will transfer any steps…

Thinking about how to manage one project vs. many projects is a very different exercise and it has little to do with the volume of work. How do you manage the conflicting interests of many projects underway simultaenously when you’re responsible for managing a multi-project environment? We discuss this and other multi-project challenges in this article.