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1. IntroductionThe purpose of this paper is to use experiences from the Norwegian Quality-at-entry regime for major governmentalinvestments to illustrate aspects on project flexibility. The paper is also an attempt to contribute with empiricalresults on some project management issues related to project flexibility.To begin with, theoretical traditions in project management are discussed. Some models for illustration of projectflexibility are also presented. Secondly, the nature of the Norwegian quality-at-entry regime for major governmentalinvestments is analyzed in general. Project flexibility is chosen as a perspective to illustrate some aspects of theregime in more depth. An attempt is also made to quantify one aspect in the general project flexibility models basedon empirical data. Finally, the results are discussed and some models for explanation of the results are proposed.1.1 Project managementSöderlund (2004) discusses two main theoretical traditions in project management research. The first tradition hasits intellectual roots in engineering science. Planning techniques and methods of project management, including therecent emphasis on uncertainty quantification and risk management, have been the major focus. This is inaccordance with Packendorff (1995), who claims that a number of writers trace the intellectual roots of projectmanagement research and knowledge to various types of planning techniques, such as PERT and CPM. The othertradition has its intellectual roots in the social sciences and is especially interested in the organizational andbehavioral aspects of projects. Söderlund (2004) terms these “the engineering tradition” and “the social sciencetradition”, respectively. In a similar distinction between project management traditions, Crawford and Pollack(2004) uses the terms “hard” and “soft”. Crawford and Pollack (2004) relates “hard” project managementapproaches to objectivist, scientific approaches and has parallels to Söderlund’s (2004) engineering tradition. The“soft” project management approaches of Crawford and Pollack (2004) stem from an interpretivist and constructivistschools of thought, and share similarities with Söderlund’s (2004) social science tradition.According to Engwall (2003), research on project management has been dominated by what he calls “the lonelyproject” perspective, with little emphasis on project context and organizational history. Engwall (2003) and Jugdev(2004) point out that current project management knowledge is a practitioner-driven theory focusing on supportingadvices to the project manager, apparently referring to the engineering tradition.The discussion on project management traditions can also be related to how “project management” is defined. Oneway is looking at it, is to consider the engineering tradition as a hard core of project management. This is notnecessarily because it is the core competence in project management. The reason is that no or few other disciplinesclaim that this is also “their” area of competence, with the possible exception of operations research. As theperspective shift to the social science tradition, influence from other disciplines becomes stronger. In such aperspective, the social science tradition draws on experiences and research approaches from areas such asorganizational science, planning, decision analysis and political science, all applied in a project context.1.2 Flexibility and project managementFlexibility is one approach to prepare projects for the effects of uncertainty. Terms like adaptability and robustnessare often used when discussing issues related to what this paper calls flexibility. Flexibility may also be described asa way of making irreversible decision more reversible or postponing irreversible decisions until more information isavailable.The uncertainty of a decision in a project can be described by the gap between the information needed to make adecision that is entirely consistent with the actual outcome, and the information available at the moment of decisionmaking (Galbraith, 2001). Mikkelsen and Riis (2003) identify a fundamental dilemma in project planning: that theimportance of decisions is at the highest at the same time as the available information is at its lowest. A commonway of reducing this dilemma is to increase the available knowledge about the project. One key idea in project3