Project Economics Under Uncertainty by Murray Cantor

Project Economics Under Uncertainty by Murray Cantor

Despite decades of advances in project and program management, far too many projects still fail. Some collapse under cost overruns, as the A380 Freighter and the UK's National Programme for IT did. Others, such as the Concorde supersonic airliner, are delivered successfully but are economic failures. The authors argue that these failures could have been avoided by applying three core principles: Embrace uncertainty, Think Like an Investor, and use Systems Thinking.

This book integrates three principles into a single, coherent approach. Embrace Uncertainty treats cost, schedule, and value as uncertain variables rather than single numbers, using Bayesian reasoning to update forecasts as evidence arrives. Think Like an Investor holds that a project succeeds only when it earns the desired return, where the benefit need not be monetary but must be quantified. Systems Thinking reasons about the whole system, its qualities as well as its features, and applies the same discipline to the project itself. These are not independent lenses to be balanced against one another; they compose into one calculation, carrying probability distributions through the structure of the system to the value of the investment.

The book is written for those teams who collaborate to deliver project value, either economic or mission-based. The book introduces each technique with just enough probability theory to build intuition, while the appendices supply the supporting mathematics and three algorithms specified in enough detail to implement: completion velocity learning, quality confidence forecasting, and fixed-price bid setting. The approach enhances rather than replaces current practice, including earned value management and risk management. Along the way, the book redefines success itself. Drawing on the James Webb Space Telescope, the Empire State Building, and the first iPhone, it shows that hitting cost, schedule, and content targets is neither necessary nor sufficient, and that success is the value a project delivers given what could reasonably be known at each decision along the way.

Murray Cantor

Murray Cantor holds a doctorate in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a retired IBM Distinguished Engineer. He has spent decades applying Bayesian methods to project and program management from an unusual vantage point, having run development projects, advised organizations on how to run theirs, and worked out the underlying mathematics. He is a co-author of the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) and has consulted on major defense and aerospace programs. He is the author of Object-Oriented Project Management with UML (John Wiley & Sons, 1998) and Software Leadership: A Guide to Successful Software Development (Addison-Wesley, 2001). He is both practitioner and formalist, a combination that rarely sits in one person.

Christian Smart

Christian Smart is an internationally recognized expert on cost and risk analytics who has spent his career applying probability to cost and schedule risk and to systems reliability across a broad variety of cutting-edge programs and technologies. He is at KBR, and previously served as Director for Cost Estimating and Analysis at the Missile Defense Agency. He is the author of Solving for Project Risk Management: Understanding the Critical Role of Uncertainty in Project Management (McGraw Hill, 2020), and holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics.

Glen B. Alleman

Glen B. Alleman is trained in physics and systems engineering and is the originator of the Performance-Based Project Management method. Now retired, he spent more than forty years delivering aerospace, defense, and industrial control systems, treating a program as a system of systems to be designed rather than a schedule to be enforced, and measuring its performance against something real. He is the author of Performance-Based Project Management: Increasing the Probability of Project Success (AMACOM, 2014) and Deploying the Digital Engineering Strategy (Taylor & Francis, forthcoming 2026), and a Peer Reviewer for Performance-Based Project Management: Increasing the Probability of Project Success (Amacom, 2024), and co-author with Jon M. Quigley of Risk Management: Managing Tomorrow's Threats (Auerbach, 2024).