Business Commons^™

Cost Overrun Optimism: Fact Or Fiction, David D. Christensen

Faculty Publications

Program managers are advocates by necessity, When taken to the extreme, program advocacy can result in the suppression of adverse information about the status of a program gram. Such was the case in the Navy's A-12 Program. In A-12 Administrative inquiry, Beach (1990) speculates that such abiding cultural problems were not unique to the Navy. To test that assertion, this paper examines cost overrun data on 64 completed acquisition contracts extracted from the Defense Acquisition Executive Summary database. Cost overruns at various contract completion points are compared with projected final cost overruns estimated by contractor and government personnel. 17 comparison …