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What actually slows a gigaproject down

9 September 2026

 

Ask anyone delivering a major programme in the GCC what causes delays and sequencing will come up early. Utilities go in too late. Approvals lag behind construction. Stations, depots and access roads are procured as if they belong to different projects rather than one system.

“None of this is new. The industry has understood these risks for years,” says Alan Caldwell, managing director for transport and infrastructure at WSP Middle East.

For Caldwell, that is what makes the pattern worth interrogating rather than simply restating.

“The more important question is why the same issues around interfaces, approvals, stakeholder alignment and delivery sequencing continue to slow major programmes when the risks are already so well understood,” he says.

The answer, he argues, is not that these programmes are too big or too technically complex. What breaks a schedule is a wider system delivered as a set of disconnected parts; an approval sitting with an authority team with no visibility of the construction sequence downstream; or a station package proceeding without the utilities diversion it depends on.

“Infrastructure programmes do not struggle because a railway is too large or a highway network is too complex,” Caldwell says. “They encounter difficulties when interconnected elements are delivered in the wrong order.”

Sequencing decisions are rarely purely technical either, he adds. They are commercial – shaped by which assets need to unlock value first, which phases are tied to funding, and where sales or investment assumptions depend on infrastructure landing in a particular order.

Approvals sit at the centre of that logic. On many programmes, they become one of the biggest sources of lost time – not because the requirements are unreasonable, but because approvals are not planned, evidenced or owned as part of the delivery logic from day one.

Caldwell has seen the same pattern across three decades of Gulf delivery, from early work on Palm Jumeirah to today’s region-wide transport programmes.

“The decisive factor has often been the same: whether interfaces, approvals, responsibilities and delivery sequencing are aligned early enough to prevent complexity becoming delay.”

Integration needs to be well understood

“Most programme teams in the region would say they understand the need for integration,” Caldwell says. Fewer are structured to deliver it. “The harder task is turning that understanding into the way projects are actually set up and managed,” he argues.

Riyadh Metro is the reference point he returns to, precisely because engineering complexity was not the deciding factor in its delivery.

Coordinating a city-scale transport system meant aligning design, construction, systems, utilities and stakeholder interfaces across every delivery vertical.

“The lesson for the region today is clear,” Caldwell says. “Ambitious programmes need a delivery model that gives every contributor a shared view of progress, risk, decision-making and the business case driving programme priorities.”

That shared view, he argues, will be what the next phase of Gulf delivery is judged on.

Whether clients, consultants, contractors, operators and approval authorities can work to a single delivery logic will be key.

“This requires more than coordination meetings. It requires integrated ways of working, shared common data environments and governance structures that make risks, decisions and dependencies visible before they become delays,” he says.

From reporting progress to managing risk before it lands

Digital tools have a role here, Caldwell says, but not as a headline in themselves.

Digital twins, programme visualisation and data-led modelling matter only if they help teams identify and address problems before they affect the wider programme.

“The real value is not technology for its own sake,” he says. “It is the ability to see, in one place, where approvals are outstanding, where interfaces are unresolved, where programme dates are slipping, where clashes are emerging and where decisions need to be escalated."

None of it works without governance behind it, he cautions. “A dashboard will not resolve a delayed approval if nobody knows who owns the decision, when it needs to be made, or how it should be escalated.”

Data only has value if the processes and responsibilities around it are clear, which is why Caldwell frames the shift the region needs not as digitisation, but as a move “from programme management as a discipline focused mainly on reporting and coordination, and towards project and programme intelligence”.

With many of the region’s programmes running for a decade or more, he adds, delivery models also need to flex as funding assumptions, user needs and policy priorities change along the way.

“The ambition behind the Gulf’s transformation programmes is not in question,” Caldwell says.

What will determine how much of it is realised on time is whether delivery models evolve at the same pace: earlier integration, clearer approval pathways, shared data environments, and every contributor working to a delivery logic that connects technical sequencing with the funding and operational case behind it.

“The region’s next challenge is not imagining bigger projects,” he says. “It is changing the way they are delivered, operated and adapted over time.”

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Yasir Iqbal

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