From Confusion to Confidence: Redefining Capital Project Planning with Agile Product Definition

By Josh Cushner, Founder and CEO, Duplex Loop

Executive Summary

Capital projects consistently face delays, cost overruns, and stakeholder frustration—not due to poor execution, but because of poor definition. While delivery methods have advanced dramatically through Lean Construction, Integrated Project Delivery, and digital coordination tools, the earliest project phase—definition—remains ad hoc, underpowered, and misaligned with business value.

This paper makes the case for a fundamental shift: adopting a structured, agile-inspired approach to the definition phase of capital projects. By doing so, we empower expert teams to clarify what should be built and why—before committing significant resources. This transition mirrors successful practices from the software, aerospace, and consumer product industries, where agile product development ensures customer needs are met before production begins. It is time the built environment followed suit.

The Hidden Risk: Poor Definition at the Start

In any capital project, there are two distinct phases:
1. Definition – identifying what should be built and why.
2. Delivery – building the defined solution efficiently and predictably.

The trouble is, while delivery processes are well-supported by project management systems, contracting structures, and digital coordination tools, the definition phase lacks structure. It’s fragmented, intuitive, and often treated as an administrative precursor to 'real' work.

This results in a dangerous pattern: teams discover definition problems only after construction begins. These are the most expensive and intractable problems to solve—causing blame, rework, delays, and waste.

The solution is clear: bring rigor and innovation to the definition phase, using proven methods from product development.

Borrowing from Product Development: Agile in the Small Room

Industries like aerospace and tech already solve this problem. Before a rocket is built, teams identify who will use it, how it must perform, and what constraints matter most. Before a new battery goes to market, developers study the customers—whether they're powering planes or phones—and iterate through prototyping and testing until they meet real-world needs.

Buildings are no different. A building is a product with a customer—the business or institution that will use it. Yet, we rarely treat it as such. We push ahead with design based on incomplete assumptions, without testing whether the emerging solution truly supports the business case.

Agile product development provides the missing structure. It focuses small, expert teams on gaining clarity through iteration and direct feedback with users. By working with real acceptance criteria—measurable success metrics aligned with business goals—teams can test ideas and eliminate uncertainty before major commitments are made.

This is the work of the “small room”: a cross-functional, expert team focused on answering the most critical definition questions before delivery begins.

The Future of Capital Projects: Two Integrated Rooms

The Small Room is where high-leverage thinking happens:
- Strategic questions are answered.
- Prototypes and models are tested with real users.
- Trade-offs between cost, speed, quality, and scalability are explored.
- The team works until it has the confidence to write the “big check.”

The Big Room—digitized with control towers, model-based coordination, and lean workflows—executes the product defined by the small room:
- It breaks the scope into modular deliverables.
- It optimizes sequencing for cost, efficiency, and speed.
- It adapts to variation without losing sight of core product goals.

When both rooms share a common digital thread—twin models, shared criteria, synchronized timelines—they become a continuous value stream. The big room no longer compensates for poor upstream decisions. Instead, it becomes a production system that scales a well-defined product.

What’s Needed to Make the Shift

This new model requires:
- Retraining in agile and product-thinking methods for early-stage project leaders.
- A mindset shift from control and compliance to iteration and inquiry in the pre-design phase.
- New services that formalize and scale “project definition” as a specialty.
- Tools that bridge the small room and big room with shared models and criteria.

At Duplex Loop, we are building this capability by working across the capital project ecosystem—consultants, investors, academics, and digital innovators—to coalesce a new standard for early-stage project planning.

We believe this is how capital projects will evolve:
From assumption to investigation. From guesswork to feedback. From confusion to confidence.

Conclusion

By investing in the definition phase with the same intensity we’ve applied to delivery, the AEC industry can finally begin to deliver projects that are:

- Better aligned with business needs.
- More predictable in cost and schedule.
- Easier to deliver with autonomous, modular teams.

This is not theory. It is a proven pattern from other industries—now translated into a model for the built environment.

Let’s stop punishing project teams for delivery problems rooted in poor definitions. Let’s redefine how we define projects.

Contact us at Duplex Loop to learn how to build your next capital project with clarity from day one.