September 6, 2012

Budget overrun or estimation deficit

The messages about budget overrun by IT projects are becoming more frequent again. Usually the tone is that IT projects are just runaway trains and that budget overrun is something that we just have to live with. An important source of this type of messages is the CHAOS series of reports that are carried out annually by Standish. In most of these types of reports one important aspect is systematically overlooked and that is the quality of the original estimate the project started with.