What do you do when you have to put a project into the budget and nobody has any idea what sort of number to use? No SMEs, no industry look-up manuals … Welcome to crowd-sourced estimates!
All you can do is try to find something that seems somewhat similar in some manner: scale, complexity, etc. and decide if yours should be more or less than that. It’s not scientific; it’s just better than nothing. Over time, we will end up collecting a rich list of projects that have been identified in many different industries; over time, cost drivers will emerge. Caveat emptor, of course. The value of the data grows with the amount of it.
The more entries we have, the better it will work; over time, as the entries add up, we’ll put it into a more interactive frame. Please put me into that situation sooner!
If you’d like to add your experience, please do. The more data points there are, the more useful the database becomes.
Click here to go to the project cost data entry page
Here’s the database. For reasons of space, it shows just the top-level project information. You can sort it, and you can search for particular words. If you want to see the full record of a project (minus identifying data fields), click the link. Choose that link also if you want to edit the record (only the person who entered it, or the site admins, can edit it).
| Project name | Project cost ($) | Duration in months | Industry | Sub-category |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ocean Cleanup floating boom | $37,000,000.00 | 60 | Construction/ Facilities | Offshore |
| Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel | $3,800,000,000.00 | 68 | Construction/ Facilities | Bridges |
| Church complex | $30,000,000.00 | 38 | Construction/ Facilities | Churches and schools |
| USCG Cutters | $11,000,000,000.00 | 72 | Government/ Military | Ships |
| Navy Destroyers | $3,400,000,000.00 | 48 | Government/ Military | Ships |
| Migration from on-premise data center to AWS | $950,000.00 | 24 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Cloud infrastructure |
| Enterprise Cloud Platform | $52,000,000.00 | 24 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Cloud platform |
| Secure computing network | $81,000,000.00 | 36 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Network Infrastructure |
| LA Farecards | $19,000,000.00 | 120 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Integrated System |
| Govt Business Modernization | $8,000,000,000.00 | 120 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Multi-system integration |
| Air traffic control system | $2,500,000,000.00 | 120 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Aviation |
| Govt system modernization | $500,000,000.00 | 48 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Government |
| Restaurant chain POS and equipment monitoring software | $1,000,000,000.00 | 60 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Hospitality |
| Logistics system | $600,000,000.00 | 120 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Production Line Automation |
| Integrated cross-company travel reservations system | $125,000,000.00 | 72 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Hospitality |
| Recovery of banking system | $80,000,000.00 | 36 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Financial Services |
| Retail IT systems modernization | $1,400,000,000.00 | 36 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Retail |
| Financial system replacement | $800,000,000.00 | 120 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Financial Services |
| Integrated enterprise software solutions | $400,000,000.00 | 24 | IT (Information Technology within ANY industry) | Retail |
| Blast furnace teardown and rebuild | $5,500,000,000.00 | 36 | Manufacturing/ Operations | Minerals refining |
| Project name | Project cost ($) | Duration in months | Industry | Sub-category |