Hacker News Reader

Comment by whoisthemachine | Hacker News Reader

> Compared to the 100 million euros Denmark spent on a new IT system for the police, a project that never delivered anything?

Governments need "sunken-cost fallacy" triggers that automatically halt projects when they pass thresholds, even when many worry about the effect of the halting. It's like a scene from a movie - "halt my project when I go over 100M EUR, even if I'm begging you not to".

View on HN

Given almost every single government project overruns, what could your threshold possibly be?

2x the initial cost seems reasonable. If the estimate was this wrong, it's useless and the project needs to be reestimated.

The problem is that many initial estimates will be low ball offers to try and win a contract. Perhaps combine the sunken-cost-limit with delayed payments, otherwise companies might low ball offers knowing they can never finish but still don't care because they'll be paid.

Better oversight is clearly needed too. There won't be one tool that'll do the job on its own.

The funny thing is, many projects (and I should have omitted government-run, any organization can suffer from this problem) have reasonable cost estimates when they begin. Why not start with those? Perhaps this rule would incentivize more realistic estimates?

The contractors have all the incentives to extract as much government money as they possibly can during the entire process.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com