"Best Owner Practices for Project Control" by John K. Hollmann, PE CCE

For the past several decades, owner companies have been reorganizing, reengineering, downsizing, and, at times, eliminating their in-house cost engineering function in a drive to improve cost competitiveness by reducing what company management perceives as “overhead.”

Capital program managers, hoping that these actions would improve cost outcomes, have largely been disappointed.  In this article, a better approach than cutting and blind outsourcing is described; an approach that uses the best owner cost engineering practices to ensure competitive outcomes.  The approach has been demonstrated to work through quantitative research of empirical industry data.