A review that stops at five million euros
A housing association is planning the renovation of 300 homes, budgeted at 2.3 million euros. No advisory board looks at it, no independent review precedes the start — that only happens to public projects above 5 million. The project manager drafts the plan of approach alone, the internal steering group signs it off, and the renovation begins. No one checks whether the scope is clearly defined, whether the choice to renovate rather than demolish and rebuild is substantiated, or whether there is an exit strategy for the moment the contractor defaults.
Why the line is drawn at the amount, not the risk
That 5 million threshold is not a substantive choice about where the risk of failure actually originates. Independent review takes time: weeks of work by reviewers who go through files, conduct interviews, and write up an opinion. That is too labor-intensive to apply to every project, so the line gets drawn at the financial stake — not at the quality of the plan. A 2 million project runs into the same mechanisms as a 20 million one: a scope that shifts during execution, a concept choice that was never weighed against alternatives, goals that describe an activity rather than a result. The size of the budget changes nothing about the odds that one of those three comes back to bite the project.
What quality before the start predicts, regardless of size
The World Bank studied roughly 1,125 projects and found that 80% of projects with satisfactory quality before the start were ultimately successful, against 25% for those with unsatisfactory quality going in. That difference sits in the state of the plan at the moment of kickoff, not in the number of zeros on the budget. A 2.3 million project with a weak plan statistically carries the same risk as a 20 million project with a weak plan — the only difference is that one never gets an outside look, and the other does.
A review that scales with any project
PlanScore assesses the plan of approach against seven building blocks and 21 criteria, delivering a score from 0 to 21 with a decision recommendation within two minutes. That is not a substitute for what an advisory board does on a public project: that depth, with file review and interviews spread over several weeks, is beyond what any automated check can reach. But it does put the same questions to a 2.3 million project as to a 50 million one — is the scope defined, is the concept choice substantiated, is there an exit strategy — at a scale where independent human review would never happen for economic reasons.
A signal, not a guarantee
A score says something about the starting position, not the outcome. The evidence behind start readiness is correlational: a plan that scores well starts with better odds of success, without the outcome being fixed. For a project below the 5 million threshold, that signal is worth no less than for one above it — in practice, it is often the only signal that will ever exist. Anyone drafting a plan of approach for a project that will never cross an advisory board's desk would do well to check for themselves whether the building blocks are in place before the kickoff begins.