How we source budget-overrun figures

Cost ranges on this site are based on public reference material across the relevant landscape. The publishers below are representative of the kind of source that informs our positioning, not an exhaustive extraction map per figure. A specific figure on a specific page is not necessarily anchored to a single named publisher.

Sources

• Bent Flyvbjerg cost-overrun research. Bent Flyvbjerg's published academic work on megaproject cost overruns is the standard reference for transport, infrastructure and construction overruns. Also his Standish Group / Reference Class Forecasting publications.
• Standish Group CHAOS Report. The annual Standish Group CHAOS Report is the long-running reference for software project success / overrun rates. Limitations and the methodology critique are described where we cite it.
• PMI Pulse of the Profession. The Project Management Institute annual Pulse of the Profession survey provides cross-industry overrun benchmarks (where pricing context is published).
• Government and infrastructure published reports. UK National Audit Office reports on government IT and infrastructure overruns, US GAO project audit reports, EU Court of Auditors reports.
• McKinsey-Oxford IT cost overrun research. The 2012 McKinsey-Oxford study on large IT project overruns and follow-up McKinsey publications are the source for the most commonly-cited '45% over budget' figure. We cite the original publication, not the soundbite.

What we deliberately do not publish

• Soundbite statistics without source attribution. Where a number is widely repeated without a clean source (e.g. '70% of IT projects fail'), we either trace it to its origin and describe the methodology critique, or we do not publish it.
• Predictions of specific-project overrun. Calculator outputs are working bands. We do not predict whether a specific project will overrun; we describe what the historical-comparable rate is for similar project types.
• Personal project data. Calculators run entirely in your browser. Your project-budget and type inputs are not transmitted, logged, or stored.

Editorial position

This site is operated by Digital Signet, an independent AI-development studio. Digital Signet does not sell project-management software, does not act as a project-rescue consultancy, does not run a programme-governance practice, and does not accept paid placements from any vendor in the project-management space. See /about for the operator and the wider network.

Editorial direction is set by Oliver Wakefield-Smith. Drafts are produced via Digital Signet's autonomous AI development methodology and reviewed against the editorial framework before publication.

Contact

For methodology questions, corrections, or scenarios that don't fit cleanly: [email protected].