1. Introduction
To meet the demand for better management and control
of major public investment projects, an arrangement for
external Quality-at-entry analyses of all public investments
in Norway with an expected budget larger than NOK 500
million (EUR 60 million)2 has been established. This socalled
Quality-at-entry Regime became operative from year
2000 and was the result of an initiative from the Norwegian
Ministry of Finance. The main factors leading to the establishment
of a mandatory external assessment of public
multi-million projects were the poor performance of many
such projects especially in terms of cost. The introduction