I have spent a long time in project controls consulting. One thing has always surprised me.
You can buy scheduling software. You can buy benchmarking tools. You can hire a Big 4 firm to write your procedures for a fee that runs into the millions.
But you cannot buy the procedures themselves. Nobody sells them.
The standards gap
AACE gives you Recommended Practices, what good looks like. PMI gives you Practice Standards, the framework. What you do not get from either is a set of operational SOPs you can hand to your project controls team and say: this is how we do it.
The major mining houses solved this problem by building their own Project Management Frameworks over decades. Barrick's CPS4. Glencore's Capital Management Framework. Sasol's Tier 4 planning QMS.
The problem for everyone else
Smaller organisations, mid-tier miners, EPCM boutiques, owner's teams, they face a difficult choice:
Option 1: Commission a consulting firm to build a methodology from scratch. This is expensive (R 1.86 million to R 4.96 million for a full 124-SOP library at market rates) and slow (months of scoping, drafting, reviewing, iterating).
Option 2: Rely on individuals. Hire experienced project controls professionals and hope they bring their knowledge with them. This works until they leave, and the institutional knowledge walks out the door.
Option 3: Do without. Run projects with informal procedures, inherited spreadsheets, and ad hoc approaches. This is the reality for most organisations, and it shows in the outcomes.
A category that did not exist commercially
That is the gap ScheduleIQ SOP Library fills.
124 SOPs. 15 domains. Available by subscription. Built from the source, not from memory. Cross-referenced against 550+ source documents including every major AACE Recommended Practice and PMI Practice Standard.
This is a category that did not exist commercially until now.
If your organisation needs a documented project controls methodology but has never had the budget or the time to build one from scratch, start with 12 free SOPs. No account required.
This article is part of the ScheduleIQ SOP Library launch series. Follow Morne Beeslaar on LinkedIn for weekly updates on project controls, AI, and capital project delivery.