Paul Barshop
IPA Chief Operating Officer
Paul Barshop joined Independent Project Analysis (IPA) in 1994 and currently serves as IPA’s Chief Operating Officer. In this role, Paul is responsible for IPA’s day-to-day operations, including implementation of IPA’s business plans. From 2000 to 2004, he served as Director of IPA’s Netherlands Office, interacting primarily with European and Middle Eastern clients. Over the past few years, Paul has taught most of the IPA Institute's course offerings, in particular Gatekeeping, Contracting, Cost & Schedule, and Megaprojects. Paul frequently delivers customized executive presentations for IPA clients.
Paul previously held the positions of Quality Manager and Project Analyst at IPA. As a Project Analyst, Paul focused on evaluating downstream process projects, especially in the petroleum and chemical areas. He led numerous benchmarking efforts and has conducted over 100 individual analyses of capital projects. He also led research to understand the performance and drivers of control system projects and the effectiveness of engineering value centers. Paul has facilitated several of IPA’s Front-End Loading (FEL) Workshops.
Paul has led multiple research studies, such as: Gatekeeping Effectiveness; Using Target Setting to Improve Cost Competitiveness; Equipment Procurement Practices That Reduce Cost; Best Practices for Alternative Selection; Improving the Effectiveness of Front-End Loading 2: The Scope Development Phase; Engineering Value Centers: Do They Deliver Value to Owners?; Site Project Portfolio Management: Getting More Business Value from Small Projects; Developing Gas Monetization Projects; and many others. Paul is currently reviewing and expanding IPA’s research on gatekeeping to identify new trends/practices and provide more specific details about the gatekeeping process.
Prior to joining IPA, Paul served as a Control Systems Engineer for a major oil company. He was responsible for the performance of control systems on a refinery crude unit, hydrocracker, and furnaces. He developed and implemented new control loops on computer and distributed control systems, and managed installation of instrumentation for furnace damper control and crude unit desalter projects. He developed and maintained control programs, databases, and man-machine interfaces. Paul was instrumental in bringing teams together to solve blending problems, and implemented system improvements that won him a recognition award.
Paul holds an M.S. degree in Business Administration from Boston University and the Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from New Mexico State University. He has authored numerous articles and presentations.