Capital projects: delivering for the decade ahead

A new era of delivery

What makes this strategy different is its consistency. It unlocks the opportunity for strategic investment and provides greater certainty needed to support innovation. Now is the time to invest confidently in the people, capability and digital tools needed to maintain strategic alignment and accountability on the path to infrastructure transformation. For many, up until now, much of the focus has been on delivering projects one by one. But the decade ahead will require a different way of thinking – beyond project-by-project and even beyond working at a programme level. Instead of treating programmes in isolation, companies will need to manage a portfolio of transformation that adopts a systems-thinking approach and supports the government’s whole-of-society resilience ambitions.

Five action points

Turning ambition into strong infrastructure portfolios that drive practical outcomes requires partnership and focus.

• Plan, prioritise and sequence with clarity – Build strong business cases, prioritise investments against strategic and customer outcomes, map dependencies and realistic schedules, manage uncertainty and work confidently within consenting requirements.  This enables leaders to make conscious trade-offs and establish a credible delivery pathway across the portfolio.
• Unlock investment and market capacity faster – Shape funding, delivery and commercial models that are investable, allocate risk intelligently and give both public and private partners the confidence to commit capital and build long-term supply-chain capacity.
• Deliver with confidence – Establish clear governance and accountability, strengthen project controls, manage supply chains and provide robust project assurance to stay on track, manage risks effectively, and deliver outcomes with certainty.
• Use data to stay in control – Good decisions made on clear insight. Creating a consistent view of cost, schedule, risk, benefits and capacity across the portfolio drives visibility over performance and progress, helping leaders make faster, better-informed choices to deploy capability.
• Show impact beyond delivery – Success is not just about time and cost. Organisations should define and track how investment improves service, resilience, affordability and environmental outcomes, while building organisational capability, supporting communities, scaling innovation and contributing to wider whole-society resilience. These benefits should be grounded in the long-term interests of customers and measured throughout delivery.

Organisations should also use major investment programmes as an opportunity to embed resilience into assets from the outset, rather than retrofitting it later. This means taking a long-term, systems-thinking approach to of how assets will continue to function through future crises, including at a Minimum Viable Company level.