Editor's Letter
By Kathy Williams

Project Management on the Fly--the Road to Nowhere
By Louis J. Sarasohn, CPA, CIA, CISA, and Michael S. Luehlfing, CMA, CPA, Ph.D.
To be successful, a project must be grounded in an appropriate implementation strategy and must be managed properly from the outset. Otherwise, it is doomed to fail. In this case study of a multinational insurance company, the authors show what happens when a project isn't managed correctly and offer some advice on how to make things right.

R&D Accounting: A New Millennium Approach
By Larry Walther, CMA, Ph.D., and Sue Strickland, CPA
Current accounting rules for research and development activities are based on Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 2, "Accounting for Research and Development Costs," which became effective in 1975. So much has changed in that area that the authors call for new rules. They suggest accounting for R&D in the same manner as for most other productive assets: Capitalize costs incurred, and then evaluate them for impairment.

Teaching Business as a System
By Joseph F. Castellano, Ph.D.; Saul Young, Ph.D.; and Harper A. Roehm, DBA, CPA
In 1999, IMA released a new Practice Analysis, Counting More, Counting Less, that described the changing roles of management accountants and the knowledge, skills, and abilities now required of them. In response, three professors at the University of Dayton revamped the MBA core course they team teach, called "Operational Systems." Here they present the rationale, framework, and topics they used to revise the course so they could teach business as a system.

SOP Mandates Capitalization of Advertising Costs
By Dale L. Flesher, CMA, CFM, CPA; Margaret Hoskins, CPA; and James H. Thompson, CPA
Although definitive guidance on how to account for advertising costs was issued in 1993, few companies have adopted the provisions of Statement of Position 93-7, "Reporting on Advertising Costs." The authors discuss the requirements, recent practice, and the debate between advertisers and accountants of whether advertising should be considered an investment.