From Risky to Ready: Capital Project Planning using Agile Product Definition
By Josh Cushner, Founder and CEO, Duplex Loop Summer 2025
Executive Summary
Capital projects consistently face delays, cost overruns, and stakeholder frustration—not due to poor execution, but because of poor definition. While delivery capabilities have advanced dramatically through massive investments in technology, 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-facing industries, where product development teams ensure customer needs are met before production begins. It is time the built environment followed suit, unlocking pent-up demand for business model innovation in capital project delivery.
The Hidden Risk: Poor Definition at the Start
In any capital project, there are two distinct phases:
1. Definition – identifying what should be built among all possible options
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. It is considered just "concepts" or "pre-construction".
This results in a dangerous pattern: teams discover definition problems only after delivery begins. These are the most expensive and intractable problems to solve—causing blame, rework, delays, and waste. Plus it is impractical to build more quality into a project once delivery is underway, so opportunities for flexibility, optionality or better outcomes are lost.
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, or if the team is correctly aligned to build it.
Agile-inspired 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 representing end-to-end partners and 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—one day to be digitized with AI control towers, model-based coordination, and efficient workflows—executes the product defined by the small room:
- It breaks the scope into modular deliverables, with control of the interfaces.
- It optimizes sequencing for cost, efficiency, and speed.
- It adapts to variation without losing sight of core product goals through fast feed-back loops with the Small Room team.
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 customer-centric product-thinking methods for early-stage project leaders.
- A mindset shift from control and compliance to iteration and inquiry in the pre-construction phase.
- New services that formalize and scale “project definition” as a specialty.
And most importantly, a new governance model under the Owner's business process that bridges the small room (driven by the Owner) and big room (driven by the build team) to create more valuable products through a better production system.
Building this capability requires partnerships across the capital project ecosystem 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 risky to ready.
Conclusion
By investing in the definition phase with the same intensity we’ve applied to delivery, the industry project teams can finally begin to create projects that are:
- Better aligned with business needs.
- More predictable in cost and schedule.
- Easier to deliver with autonomous, modular teams and new AI-enabled turnkey products / services.
This is a proven approach from other industries— which needs to now be translated into a model for the built environment. Forward-thinking businesses are already putting this into practice. Its time that the architecture, engineering, construction, PM and operations professionals learn to adapt and innovate for the future as well.