Rethinking Capital Project Delivery

Capital projects are under pressure. Costs blow out. Timelines shift. Outcomes disappoint. Despite decades of reform, new tools and updated frameworks, major works across industries continue to suffer from underperformance. This is not due to a lack of skill, effort, or investment. It’s because the systems and assumptions that underpin project delivery were designed for a different era—an era of slower change, lower complexity, and narrower ambitions.

Rethinking Capital Project Delivery confronts this reality head-on. It challenges the industry’s deeply embedded habits and offers a bold yet practical alternative. By uncovering the structural flaws that trap projects in cycles of cost and schedule overruns, the book lays out a pathway to more adaptive, reliable, and transparent delivery models—models that are grounded in data, supported by intelligent systems and built to evolve in real time.

At the heart of this transformation is a mindset shift. In a world defined by complexity, uncertainty must be managed—not avoided. Traditional delivery methods, with their rigid stage gates and front-loaded planning assumptions, often fail to accommodate the dynamics of modern infrastructure. Projects are treated as linear forecasts rather than adaptive systems. Problems are solved late, rather than anticipated early. Teams are overloaded with information but starved of insight.

This book proposes a new foundation for capital delivery—one that balances discipline with flexibility, structure with learning, and governance with intelligent automation. Central to this approach is agentic AI: a new generation of autonomous systems capable of reasoning, interacting, and adapting. These are not conventional software tools. They are digital collaborators that reduce coordination friction, handle complexity at scale, and help project leaders make faster, more grounded decisions.

Readers will learn how agentic systems can enable right-to-left planning, improve modular and incremental delivery and surface early signals of risk before they escalate. These systems provide real-time visibility, not retrospective reports. They automate compliance, support better scoping, and enable delivery teams to respond dynamically to changing conditions. Importantly, they do not replace human judgement—they amplify it.

But this book is not about technology alone. It is about shifting the logic of delivery. Through a series of frameworks, use cases and clear explanations, it explores the organisational, behavioural and cultural changes needed to modernise the way capital projects are delivered. It challenges outdated notions of control, prediction, and standardisation, replacing them with strategies rooted in transparency, accountability, and continuous learning.

Rethinking Capital Project Delivery is written for those who know that current systems are no longer working—and are ready to lead the shift. It speaks directly to executives, programme directors, policymakers, investors and practitioners seeking practical, forward-looking strategies that match the scale and speed of today’s challenges. It avoids technical hype in favour of grounded insight. It reframes problems not as failures of effort, but as failures of fit between legacy models and modern conditions.

The message is clear. Capital projects will not be transformed by tweaking what already exists. They will be transformed by rethinking the fundamentals—how we plan, how we decide and how we deliver. This book offers the tools and perspective to do exactly that. It is a guide to building the next generation of capital project systems: smarter, faster, more transparent, and far better prepared for what comes next.