Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 1994
Abstract
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 shows that the overruns projected by the contractor and government were excessively optimistic throughout the lives of the contracts examined. These results were found insensitive to contract type cost, price, contract phase development, production, the type of weapon system air, ground, sea, and the military service (Air Force, Army, Navy) that managed the contract.
Source Publication
Acquisition Review Quarterly
Recommended Citation
Christensen, D. S. (1994). Cost overrun optimism: Fact or fiction? Acquisition Review Quarterly, 1(1): 25-38. DTIC: ADA487992.
Included in
Finance and Financial Management Commons, Government Contracts Commons, Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons
Comments
This article appears in Acquisition Review Quarterly, a publication of Defense Acquisition University. Sourced from DTIC: ADA487992.