Habu @ 53

I used to run the department at a very large public agency that developed and funded the agency’s capital program, multi-hundreds of millions of dollars anually. Projects ALWAYS wound up costing way more than we were promised, no matter how much due diligence and analysis we subjected them to. (We did not control the designers and had minimal control over scope creep, I should add.)

One day I asked the person responsible for vetting requested projects for his perspective on this, and his response, talking about those requesting our money for their projects, was poetic:

“The ALL lie… ALL the time.”

I will also note that one person on my staff tracked a range of projects from the first time they were brought to us to the final change order, and she developed “The Universal Coefficient of Expansion,” which was 2.8. That applied from the time the requester was confident enough to come to us with a figure, so it did not even allow for all the early, internal estimates within the engineering area.

Finally, I once asked the head of Architecture why his people couldn’t give us better estimates, to which he replied “Why, if we told you what it would really cost, you would never fund it.” Of course, he knew he had the Executive Director on his side.

Government in action (inaction?).