Improving Performance in Decision Making on Public Investment Projects. The Industrial Ecology perspective on the Norwegian Quality-at-entry regime

Government investment projects do not always meet the expectations, goals and standards promised by their stakeholders and the decision makers. They are commonly delivered too late, too costly and do not meet the quality standards they should. Even worse, they do not give the effect they where supposed to. Waste of public resources this way, is not acceptable and central government has to do something about it. This paper introduces available choices of actions to improve the performance in government decision making on investment projects. The focus is on experience gained in Norway. The Ministry of finance has introduced a mandatory Quality assurance scheme and a Research programme to meet the most important challenges in major public projects in Norway. Systematic studies are performed for all public investment projects with budget larger than NOK 500 mill (approx. EURO 60 million), excluding the oil-sector. Since the introduction of the QA scheme in year 2000, we have studied some 50 projects in the pre-project phase. It is vital for the government to introduce improvement processes to secure better use of public resources. That is why the Quality-at-entry regime was established, and that is why this essay focuses on improving the existing regime. The essay describes the Quality-at-entry regime as it is today. Further, it describes how it looks like in the light of Industrial Ecology and Systems Engineering. The purpose of this is to identify needs for improvement in the established QAE regime. I have found a substantial number of possible improvements. The indicated changes do not represent a paradigm shift for the regime. They act more like a reassurance. However, some of the findings are potentially important to the QAE regime and the work to improve decision making in major public investment projects.