Advanced Project Delivery: Moving Beyond the Traditional Boundaries of Project Management

A Persistent Project-Delivery Problem

Despite decades of improvement in project management, major projects continue to struggle with cost, schedule, productivity, and execution reliability.

An analysis of approximately 16,000 major projects found that only 8.5% were delivered on time and on budget, while only 0.5% also achieved the expected benefits. In oil and gas megaprojects, EY reported that 64% experienced cost overruns and 73% experienced schedule delays. Research also shows that rework, waiting, poor work readiness, and fragmented workflows continue to consume significant project capacity.

Organizations often respond with more detailed schedules, meetings, reports, controls, and software. These remain important, but they do not always improve how work is executed.

Project control monitors cost, schedule, milestones, and forecasts. Production control ensures that work is ready, constraints are removed, capacity is available, and activities flow in the correct sequence.

Project Management Remains Essential

Project management provides the disciplines needed to establish governance, define objectives, coordinate stakeholders, organize resources, manage risk, control change, and maintain accountability.

The PMBOK® Guide—Eighth Edition emphasizes value delivery, adaptability, accountability, quality, sustainability, empowered teams, and the need to tailor project-management practices to the project environment.

Advanced Project Delivery should therefore not be presented as a rejection of project management. APD recognizes that successful delivery also requires explicit attention to the project as a production system.

Project management establishes what the project must achieve and how it will be directed. Production management addresses how work will move reliably through engineering, procurement, fabrication, logistics, construction, commissioning, and turnover.

What Is Advanced Project Delivery?

APDI defines Advanced Project Delivery as:

APD connects project-management disciplines with the principles and practices needed to manage execution as an interconnected production system.

The Building Blocks of Advanced Project Delivery

Project and Program Management

Provides governance, integration, stakeholder coordination, risk management, scheduling, financial control, quality, and accountability. APD connects these disciplines more closely with how work is actually executed.

Lean Construction

Lean thinking provides the underlying mindset for APD. It is not merely a collection of tools, but a way of thinking that emphasizes value, respect for people, collaboration, reliable commitments, workflow, waste reduction, and continuous improvement. Its key practices include pull planning, constraint removal, the Last Planner System, Target Value Delivery, and visual management.

Advanced Work Packaging

Structures engineering, procurement, construction, commissioning, and turnover around the intended construction sequence. It connects the Path of Construction with coordinated work packages, workface planning, and systems completion.

Project Production Management

Treats the project as a production system and applies Operations Science to capacity, variability, work-in-process, throughput, and cycle time. It helps teams improve flow, manage bottlenecks, and avoid releasing more work than the system can handle.

Collaborative and Digital Delivery

APD aligns governance, contracts, incentives, responsibilities, and decision-making across project participants. Digital models, shared data environments, analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence improve visibility, but technology must support a well-designed delivery system.

Sustainability and Lifecycle Value

APD considers environmental, social, economic, and operational value throughout the asset lifecycle. This includes resource efficiency, carbon reduction, waste prevention, responsible procurement, safety, resilience, maintainability, reliability, and whole-life cost.

Leadership and Organizational Culture

APD depends on leadership, trust, reliable commitments, cross-functional cooperation, frontline participation, learning, and capability development. Without these conditions, organizations may adopt APD tools without achieving meaningful change.

APD as an Integrated Delivery

APD brings together project management, Lean Construction, Advanced Work Packaging, Project Production Management, digital delivery, sustainability, organizational culture, and other emerging approaches into one coherent delivery system.

Not every project requires every approach. The relevant principles and practices are selected and integrated according to the project’s needs, complexity, capability, and context.

The APDI Perspective

APDI believes that recurring project-performance problems cannot be solved only through more detailed schedules, frequent reports, additional meetings, or new software. These remain important, but they must be connected to a delivery system that manages how work is prepared, released, produced, handed over, and continuously improved.

Advanced Project Delivery therefore expands the central project question from:

For project participants, APD aligns governance, information, materials, work readiness, production control, and project controls with execution priorities.

It is not an additional terminology or administrative layer, but a coherent integration of relevant delivery approaches to improve overall project performance.

The ultimate objective is to deliver complex projects more reliably, productively, predictably, sustainably, and with greater value throughout the asset lifecycle.