ABSTRACT
It is unlikely that anyone would be so audacious as to attempt to present a business case without any cost information in it at all, but too often the standard of costing is so poor that it might be better to invite decision makers to have a guess at the costs and form a view on the basis of their own experience. There may be many reasons for this phenomenon, but two stand out as the most likely, and it is worth dwelling on these issues briefly as most of this section is about how to deal with them. Not surprisingly, they recall the two main causes of bad business cases – problems of competence and problems of integrity. The failure to tackle costing with sufficient seriousness and integrity is perhaps the single biggest cause of disaster in projects and programmes. Figure 5.1 gives a grim example.
