When you break it down, projects are pretty simple. You have a set of expectations at the beginning, and you have an outcome that you’re looking to achieve at the end. You got to do a bunch of stuff in between there, and that’s where things can get challenging. This is because nine times out of ten, the outcome doesn’t align with initial expectations. What’s missing is outcome assurance. Outcome assurance is the process to make sure that your project outcome aligns with initial project expectations. If you want outcome assurance on your projects, then listen for more.
Only outcome. Why? The future of project delivery depends on outcome assurance. My name is Paul Turner, and I’m the president of ICXA. I’ve spent the last 25 years working on some of the most complex projects in the world. I’ve built satellites and rockets for the Canadian Space Agency. I’ve delivered multibillion-dollar power generation and transmission projects on time and on budget. And I’ve worked on wastewater treatment plant upgrades and expansions for brownfield projects. And here’s what I’ve learned: even world-class execution doesn’t guarantee success unless someone takes ownership of the outcome right from the start. Projects drift to the end with no plan to finish. That’s what I want to share with you today, a shift in how we lead projects from managing tasks to assuring outcomes. You see, projects don’t fail at the end; they fail at the start when nobody owns the outcome. Projects get started, everyone’s working hard, but the intended project outcome gets lost along the way, and projects fail to deliver on expectations with missed deadlines, cost overruns, and systems that don’t produce the desired results. Failure is the default state of projects, and if you don’t demand a successful outcome, your projects will be assigned the default path, which is failure. Instead of following the default path to failure, you need to choose a path that assures the desired outcome.
This is Professor Bent Flyvbjerg. He’s from the University of Oxford, and he’s compiled a database of over 16,000 projects over the last few decades from all over the world. And in his book, How Big Things Get Done, his research shows that nine out of ten projects are late and over budget. The complexity of projects is a contributing factor in his research to how late projects are. When nobody owns the outcome, complex projects drift along forever and maybe never get to the finish line. It’s a common occurrence that projects don’t deliver their expected outcome, and the worst part is we just accept this as normal. It’s just the way it’s always been done, right? There are three common mistakes that lead to these results on projects, and I’ll go through each one of them. The first mistake is everyone’s busy, but no one agrees on what success looks like at the end. Without a clear shared finish line, effort gets misaligned right from the start. Everyone’s working hard, and they’re completing tasks, but groups fail to deliver what’s actually needed to achieve the project outcome. And I mean, like, a real understanding of what it takes for projects to meet expectations. Completing construction isn’t the goal.
Delivering a functional plant, process, or energy facility or transportation network? What’s really required to make these systems useful and functional? When each project group has a different idea of what success looks like in the end, then it’s impossible to align outcomes. And the only outcome that really matters, of course, on projects is to deliver high-quality assets on time that can be used for decades of reliable operation. It’s exactly like Stephen Covey says in his book, Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. His habit #2 is, begin with the end in mind. And this is how capital projects must begin, with a clear vision of what success looks like at the end. Starting right at the beginning of projects, the finish and outcome of your project must be clearly defined before you even start, before contracts are signed, and before you even make financial commitments to proceed with the project.
This is, of course, your guiding star on what the outcome of the project is, to start with the end in mind and align every project decision with this intended outcome. Now, mistake #2 is that project groups assume that if they deliver their scope, the project will work. But successful projects aren’t the sum of all the completed tasks; they are the result of aligned systems that function together. There’s a million ways to finish a project, and unfortunately, everyone has their own idea of what the project outcome looks like. But when everyone’s part does not add up to the desired outcome, that’s when projects fail to deliver on expectations. In order to get to the end, all project groups must have a clear understanding of what the end looks like and how their role contributes to the desired outcome. Only then can the path to completion be simplified when everyone is aligned on the desired outcome. The third mistake? Projects often treat readiness, integration, testing, training, and documentation as something that happens after construction. This turns startup into a scramble.
Readiness isn’t an afterthought. It’s a discipline that must begin early and is only successful when all groups are working towards the same vision of what success looks like at the end. When project teams leave readiness to the end, they’re just gambling. There’s no way to get consistent results from projects, and as long as fingers are crossed hoping things will work in the end, your project outcome will be inconsistent every time. The only thing that matters on projects is delivering on expectations set out at the beginning by achieving the intended project outcome. Connect expectations at the beginning with the outcome at the end, and you’ve accomplished what you set out to do, with the outcome being the most important thing. It must be the primary focus right from the start. All right, so these are the three common mistakes that are made on projects, and these are the three main reasons projects fail to deliver outcomes. If you fix just these three things, you’ll make huge improvements on your projects and have much more success achieving your desired outcomes.
So, what is actually missing on projects, though? We have planners and schedulers, contractors, vendors, commissioning teams, and operators, but no one truly owns the outcome. Everyone owns a piece of the scope, and everyone checks a box. But who’s accountable for delivering the project outcome? Project managers are managing cost and schedule. Engineers are delivering the design. Contractors are installing equipment. Commissioning does the testing. But who is responsible for the original project expectations to make sure those expectations are met and deliver the desired project outcome? The authority responsible for this outcome—that’s what’s missing on projects. What’s missing is outcome assurance. Backed by the ICA Global CX Standard, outcome assurance is a leadership framework that ensures every part of a project is aligned and integrated to deliver the intended result—not just finish a project, but deliver one that meets the intended outcome. There are five aspects of outcome assurance, and I’ll go through each one shortly.
Project assurance has evolved over the last several decades. In the 1980s, we had the safety revolution. This era resulted in a sharp focus on workplace safety. Organizations prioritized hazard mitigation, worker protection, and compliance. This era laid the foundation for modern health and safety regulations, embedding risk management into the DNA of project delivery. As safety protocols became standard in the 1990s, we then had a shift towards quality assurance. Delivering infrastructure was no longer just about completing projects; it was about getting them right. Standards like ISO 9001 emerged, emphasizing consistency, process control, and continuous improvement. QA became synonymous with reliability, helping to reduce defects, reduce rework, and reduce inefficiencies across the industry. Now, by the 2000s, a broader mandate emerged: environmental, social, and governance accountability. It was no longer enough for projects to be safe and high quality. They now had to reflect ethical practices and long-term sustainability.
Standards like ISO 14000 and corporate ESG frameworks pushed organizations to integrate environmental and social infrastructure planning and delivery. Today, we’re entering a new phase: outcome assurance. Safety, quality, and ESG compliance are now expected. But in a world of escalating investment complexity and public accountability, the question has changed. It’s no longer, is the project safe, compliant, and built to spec? It’s now, does the project deliver the outcome that we intended? Outcome assurance ensures that infrastructure projects meet their strategic, financial, and societal objectives, not just their technical requirements. Outcome assurance embeds governance, evidence-based planning, and commissioning-led accountability from the outset, aligning every stakeholder with the desired end results. Let’s review each pillar of outcome assurance. Projects must start with a clear vision and strategy. Align every stakeholder around a clear, shared outcome. This pillar ensures that the finish line is known from day one and that every decision is guided by the results you intend to deliver.
Vision and strategy is the discipline of aligning every project stakeholder, from executives to operators, around a clear, actionable, and measurable definition of success from day one. Vision and strategy include a shared outcome definition—not just scope, schedule, and budget, but a project strategy that ties every activity and every decision to that outcome. Vision and strategy include a clear governance structure and decision-making authority. But without vision and strategy, projects might start fast, but they go nowhere. You end up optimizing the wrong things. Teams might hit their targets, but the project still fails. Outcome assurance becomes impossible because the outcome was never defined. With vision and strategy, you eliminate ambiguity, unite stakeholders, and keep everyone headed toward the one finish line that’s agreed. All kickoff meetings clarify what done means functionally. All contracts and scopes reference the same definition of readiness. The integration testing and commissioning strategy is written at project start, not after construction. And everyone knows what we are trying to build and what success looks like on day one. Most projects align on deliverables, not outcomes, and that’s like everyone rowing in different directions. Vision and strategy brings everyone into the same boat with the same map. It’s the first lever of control a leader must pull, and you can test this by asking your team, what does success look like? If you get multiple different answers, well then, you’ve already lost alignment. Starting a project is a big undertaking with a lot of risk along the way. It’s like climbing a mountain, and if you don’t have a clear understanding of your destination, you’ll never plant the flag at the end. The next pillar is information outcome.
Projects must use data to make real-time, evidence-based decisions to guide project outcomes. With the right information connected through all stages of projects, the digital thread is accurate, accessible, and aligned to the end information. Outcome assurance is the discipline of ensuring that accurate, verified, and accessible data is available to support decisions, prove readiness, and enable operations across the entire asset life cycle. It includes verified system-level documentation and records, structured standardized data such as CFOS or CMS-ready formats, aligned digital turnover packages from construction to commissioning to operations, information governance consistent with ISO 19650, and seamless integration with digital twins, asset management systems, and operational dashboards. However, without information outcome assurance, you have handover chaos, data black holes, and delays in startup. Your project outcome just becomes guesswork, your operations team wastes months trying to rebuild the asset digitally, and you can’t prove readiness. You can’t manage risk because you can’t really see the truth. With information outcome assurance, you gain trust in your progress, reduce risk exposure, and make smarter decisions faster. Engineering tags are traceable all the way through construction, commissioning, and operation.
Turnover packages are digital, structured, and system-based, not just PDF dumps of information. Progress tracking tools connect directly to field verification systems. System handovers aren’t just about documentation; they’re about data that you can actually act on, because you can’t lead what you can’t see. This pillar gives you a single source of truth, so everyone sees the same project in real time with verified data. It’s how you build confidence, not confusion. So, if you think about this, when a senior exec asks, are we ready? Do you trust the answer that you give? The next pillar is installation outcome. Often, projects get built, but what’s built doesn’t align with what’s needed to achieve the outcome. Project teams that succeed go beyond physical installation to also ensure assets are constructed in a way that supports flow, function, and readiness. This pillar bridges the gap between mechanical turnover and operational value installation. Outcome assurance ensures that physical assets are not only built but installed, inspected, and verified in a way that enables system performance, integration, and safe operations. It includes verified completion of all systems and subsystems aligned with system boundaries. It includes inspection and test records per inspection and test plans, confirmed conformity with design intent, field adjustments, and operational requirements.
It is completion aligned with system turnover, not just area or contractor milestones. It’s standardized walk-downs, punch listing, and readiness verification per ASTM CSA and project-specific standards. Too often, project teams focus on construction as the outcome. Consider if you’re building a bridge. In this case, construction is the outcome. You want a solidly built bridge that can last for decades. Now, consider more complex systems. If you’re building, say, a wastewater treatment plant, the goal is not construction. The goal is a facility that takes in wastewater and treats it sufficiently to safely and responsibly release it to the river. For an LNG facility, the goal is to take raw crude in one end of the plant and treat it through each train to produce liquefied natural gas for loading on a ship. For a power substation, the goal is to deliver power to where it’s needed, transform power to different voltage levels, and protect the system when there is a fault. Construction alone doesn’t produce these outcomes. Construction is one step of the process to achieve these goals, and the outcome of installation activities must align with what’s needed to achieve these outcomes now.
Without installation outcome assurance, you end up with assets that are physically complete but functionally unusable. Integration fails even when individual systems appear to be complete, safety and compliance issues emerge during late-stage testing, and projects enter startup with unresolved construction defects, leading to delays and lots of expensive rework. Now, with installation outcome assurance, you ensure that what’s built works not just in theory, but in practice. Completion is tracked by system, not just discipline or trade. Installations are inspected and accepted with clear test records per ISO 9001 and project ITPs. Systems are constructed with future testing and operation in mind, not just to hand over a scope. Systems are constructed with future testing and operation in mind, not just to hand over a scope, and red-line markups and field modifications are captured and verified before integration begins. This is where quality and outcome meet installation. Outcome assurance isn’t about getting to done; it’s about enabling performance. It’s where you close the gap between design intent and field reality. When you think about it, you shouldn’t have to fix the project after turnover.
This pillar makes sure that you don’t have to. The next aspect to consider is integration outcome. All efforts and activities need to come together. In the end, everything is integrated to deliver the project outcome, bringing systems, stakeholders, and processes together early and intentionally. Integration must be planned, tested, and verified, not rushed at the end when time and budgets are tight. Integration outcome assurance ensures that individual systems, interfaces, and teams come together in a controlled and verified way, enabling the project to function as a unified operational whole. It includes early system interface planning and ownership, defined and tested interface points between systems, vendors, and disciplines, execution of system-level testing, not just equipment-level testing, coordination between FATs, IFAT, commissioning, and startup teams, and verification of operational sequences, control logic, and functional interactions. However, without integration outcome assurance, systems that pass individual tests often fail when combined. You discover all your past problems during startup, the most expensive time to fix them. Teams end up pointing fingers at the handover boundary, and control systems behave unpredictably with unplanned shutdowns and expensive rework.
Now, with integration outcome assurance, you de-risk the final phases and avoid any late surprises and validate performance before even going live. Interface registers are developed and managed early—mechanical, electrical, software, and even human interfaces. Cross-functional integration test plans are defined and scheduled well before on-site testing. Equipment and control systems are pre-integrated during FAT and IFAT, not only during on-site testing. And functional testing validates that inputs, outputs, alarms, and sequences work across systems. Integration outcome isn’t a commissioning problem; it’s a leadership responsibility. And you can’t leave system testing to the end, because if your systems aren’t talking to each other early, then neither are your teams. And this is the difference between finding problems when it’s cheap or when it’s catastrophic and much more expensive to deal with. And the last pillar of outcome assurance is operation outcome. Projects produce value when they operate as originally intended to produce a desired result. This ensures operation teams are equipped, trained, and prepared to take ownership of the asset immediately. This pillar ensures a smooth handover and accelerates value realization from the moment the project goes live.
Operation outcome assurance ensures that the people, systems, documentation, and processes required to operate and maintain the asset are fully in place so value can be realized from the very first day. It includes confirmed operations team involvement during design, construction, and commissioning, completed training, operator procedures, and maintenance strategies, fully loaded asset data and CMS-ready handover, validated emergency procedures, control room interfaces, and shift readiness, and includes all operational scenarios tested during commissioning that includes all normal, abnormal, and shutdown operations procedures. Now, without operation outcome assurance, operations just inherit a half-finished system and become the firefighting crew. Operations inherit a system that they don’t understand, leading to rework, downtime, and lots of safety risks. Maintenance is reactive, and there’s nothing proactive about it, and ownership is delayed, and value is lost in the critical early months. Now, with operation outcome assurance, you deliver a project that works and an operations team that’s ready on day one.
Operations are engaged during design reviews and witness testing. Maintenance plans and spares are defined, procured, and tracked upfront. Digital asset data is formatted for handover into equipment asset management systems. Training is both classroom and in-field, validated through competency checks and operational drills, and scenarios are completed during system testing. This pillar shifts ownership before handover training. Spare parts, maintenance plans, digital integration—these must be complete before startup, not months later. Because the reality is, if your operators aren’t ready, your project isn’t ready either. And it doesn’t matter what the ribbon-cutting says. OK, let’s review a case study. I led startup of a $5 billion power project. I had an amazing team to work with, and we all started with a clear understanding of the outcome three years in advance of the in-service date in 2015. The in-service date was selected as a very specific day of July 1st, 2018—not a range, not a quarter, a single very specific day. We delivered the project on July 4th, 2018—three days late. Now, if you work on projects, you know this is unheard of. Most projects are months, if not years, late. And here’s how we did it. I started on the project in 2015, three years before the in-service date. My responsibility was to deliver the outcome: in-service assets that can be used for decades of reliable operation starting on day one.
Now, this was a $5 billion power project with high visibility, multiple stakeholders, and complex systems. I couldn’t fake it. There was no hand-waving because if we missed this date, everyone would know. And in that moment, three years out, we made a decision as a project team that we would own the outcome from the very beginning. We didn’t just focus on tasks, scopes, or milestones; we focused on the finish line. We asked, what does success look like when this is over? What has to be true for this to deliver power, not just be built? That’s when it started, and what followed was something now called outcome assurance, though back then we didn’t have that name. We built a vision everyone could align to, not just Gantt charts, but clarity on purpose. We didn’t just collect documents; we verified readiness system by system. You could walk into our control room and know in real time what was truly ready to go. Our field teams didn’t just install equipment. They built with testing and operations in mind—no shortcuts, no handoffs with question marks. And we didn’t wait for the end to integrate. We tested software and hardware early. We brought control systems together long before on-site testing. We solved problems when they were still cheap to fix.
Most importantly, we didn’t throw the project over the fence to the next group. And on that final week, three years later, we crossed the finish line together—not with panic, not with finger-pointing, but with clarity and with confidence. And to prove it, there was not a single claim on the project. And you know that never happens. Most projects are stuck with lawyers in courts for years afterwards. This is the magic of outcome assurance. That experience taught me something I’ll never forget. Projects don’t succeed because people hustle harder at the end. They succeed because leaders create outcome assurance at the start. That’s what outcome assurance is all about. And once you’ve seen it work, you can’t go back. Let’s review the five pillars to achieve outcome assurance on your projects: vision and strategy—a clear understanding by everyone of what success looks like; information outcome—connected data through all stages of projects; installation outcome—systems that are not only built but are aligned with the intended outcome; integration outcome—everything working as one plant process to achieve the project outcome; and operation outcome—systems and teams that are ready for defect-free operation on day one. If even just one of these pillars is missing, project teams are just gambling with the outcome of their project.
As industries adapt, the shift is inevitable. The question is no longer, is the project safe, is the project high quality, and is the project compliant? But does the project truly deliver the intended benefits in this era that we’re in? Assurance is about outcomes, not just process. Projects are getting even more complex, and there are a lot of pieces of the puzzle. For things to be correct, you need to ensure things go well with outcome assurance at the beginning of projects. It only makes sense that projects begin with robust outcome assurance because without it, you’re guaranteed to miss a piece of the puzzle at the end. Outcome assurance is your conductor to orchestrate your project outcome, your outcome authority to make sure each piece fits within the whole. Outcome assurance makes everything come together in the end to ensure your intended project outcome aligns with initial expectations. OK, so this is great and all, but how do we actually implement outcome assurance on your projects? It’s easier than you think. Outcome assurance is fully defined in the ICA Global CX Standard. This is the global standard that assures the outcome of your project. These are the proven practices that successful teams use to achieve their project objectives. I’ve had success with outcome assurance, and I’m not the only one. Project teams that are successful are the ones that implement outcome assurance right from the start. And if you want outcome assurance on your projects, then you need to get a copy of this standard. It’s easy to do. Just go to icxa.net, and you can sign up, click the Become a Member icon, and get instant access to the ICXA members area with access to the standard. There is no cost; the standard is publicly available to everyone.
Plus, there are lots of additional resources you can access to achieve outcome assurance on your projects. And once you get a copy of the standard, you can start getting outcome assurance on your projects as well. And if you have any questions or need any support to get outcome assurance on your projects, feel free to contact us. You can email us at info@icxa.net or book a call to meet with one of our ICXA board members. Go to icxa.net/OA and select a time to meet. We’ll make sure your projects are assured to meet their intended outcome. The next generation of capital projects won’t be built the old way. And those that lead with outcome assurance? They’re the ones that will lead the industry. Thanks for listening. To become a member of the Industrial Commissioning Association, visit icxa.net. Members get access to commissioning standards, procurement specifications, commissioning, training, and certification, plus many more specialized resources to help you with commissioning of your industrial plant, process, and energy systems. Visit icxa.net for more information.
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