Giga Projects: Lessons learnt from technology activation

The Saudi Vision 2030 is an ambitious and transformative plan aimed at unlocking the full potential of the Kingdom. Through various giga-projects, the Kingdom is creating unique destinations for tourism, entertainment, sports, and culture, which leverage its rich history and heritage and aim to improve the quality of life for citizens, as well as attract visitors from all over the world.

Several exciting projects, such as NEOM, a megacity, and Qiddiya City, an entertainment, sports, arts and culture destination that will include the SixFlags amusement park and the world's first gaming and esports neighbourhood. We also have the likes of Red Sea Global, Diriyah, and Al Ula and additional projects are being launched all the time. These projects have made significant progress over the past few years, moving from the conceptual phase to construction, and some have launched the early phases of their assets.

Complexity of giga projects

Following factors contributes to the complexity of the Giga projects:

1. Scale of giga projects: Such projects are characterised by their massive scale and substantial construction efforts. Due to the prolonged development and construction phases that can span several years, managing budgets, securing funding and ensuring financial viability are essential elements of their complexity.
2. Managing multiple stakeholders: Giga projects involve a multitude of stakeholders, including governments, private investors, local communities, and regulatory bodies. Managing diverse interests, expectations, and potential conflicts is a complex undertaking.
3. Continuously evolving operating model and master plans: To keep up with strategic objectives, giga projects tend to experiment with the operating model to accommodate organisational evolution.  Multiple factors also contribute to non-harmonised financial, development, IT and procurement master plans.

Without the burden of legacy technologies and systems, these giga projects leverage technology as an enabler and a differentiator, offering highly personalised and immersive visitor experiences powered by next-generation digital infrastructure. There is a relentless pursuit to deploy what is commonly referred to as ‘smart services’ or ‘smart technologies’ to transform into ‘smart destinations’ that will increase efficiencies and improve the quality of life for visitors.

Through our years of experience in the technology activation and implementation for giga projects, we have come across many pitfalls and challenges across strategy and execution, and the key ones can be summarised as follows:

Challenges faced during strategy phase

• Lack of a clear business operating model and governance structure which is creating ambiguity in ways of working and accountabilities

• Lack of visitor experience vision to align the efforts of the organisation and key stakeholders

• Lack of alignment across strategies due to multiple overlapping efforts across the organisation and absence of strategy roadmaps activation

• Delay in defining technology strategy given the focus on development / delivery of the giga projects

Challenges faced during execution phase

• Lack of stable organisation structure and leadership

• Working in silos across the organisation, with ownership of technology in particular dispersed across the organisation without proper governance and standardisation

• More focus on delivering systems / technology without ensuring alignment to visitor experience goals and aspirations

• Omission of technology requirements in asset designs, with the expectation that they can be addressed in the future, especially given the budget constraints

• Lack of alignment between business / operational requirements and systems and the digital infrastructure required to support it

• Lack of standardisation of vendor landscape across assets to ensure synergies across systems

• Inability to find / hire experienced technology resources and inability to quickly ramp up the capacity given the aggressive timelines, which results in delay to overall execution and operational readiness, and is in general the root case for dispersed technology ownership across the organisation

 We believe that lessons learned from our collective experience working in complex environments can be beneficial for giga projects. These could lead to more predictable outcomes and consolidated efforts to maximise operational readiness, while reducing a siloed way of working. 

Key lessons learnt during strategy phase

1. Clarity on the organisation landscape

• Acknowledge the differences between a brownfield and greenfield organisations and develop the appropriate delivery approaches and timelines

• Clearly understand the roles and define responsibilities of the organisation. For example, the demarcation of scope between the corporate and delivery / operations team

• Define the ecosystem partners and their role to ensure appropriate engagement and minimise overlap

2. Clear vision for the smart destination with buy-in from all stakeholders

• Vision for smart destination must be aligned with all stakeholders with strong sponsorship at the executive level

• Clear and detailed visitor experience direction, ensuring adherence and compliance throughout the giga project delivery timelines

• Well-defined technology strategy with a realistic roadmap to achieve the target capabilities, in line with organisation maturity and availability of key stakeholders

• Involve and provide transparency to business units in all aspects of technology activation

• Develop business case for every initiative to ensure right value is being delivered

3. Well-defined journeys for every persona involved in the lifecycle

• Detailing the experience direction at the beginning of asset delivery, to enough detail / granularity with a dedicated experience management function for governance of capability / technology enablement efforts

• In addition to visitors and citizens, experience expectations and journeys should be defined from the perspectives of other users such as operators, business owners, regulators that helps in carving the holistic picture of business and technology enablers

Key lessons learnt during the execution phase

1. Right organisation capabilities to support and manage delivery

• Be ready with organisation capabilities (for example, procurement, and talent requisition) and processes before implementation of products and services

• Focus on ramping up quickly the enabling organisation capabilities to drive technology activation (such as the experience management, PMO, Enterprise Architecture, cybersecurity, data) to support on the journey to smart destination

• Focus on having the right partners to ramp up activation of key capabilities with a focus to transition such capabilities inhouse once the organisation is more mature / stable

• Be progressive with small increments in technology activation through a hybrid agile approach vs long and complex waterfall implementation

2. Establish centralised design authority for technology governance

• Establish design principles, guidelines and basis of design for ICT and digital infrastructure, along with smart use cases to be deployed on ground

• Strengthen governance across the entire technology landscape, ensuring that the required digital infrastructure is available when needed to support business or operational applications and  systems.

• Ensure business readiness and finalise project scope of work before vendor onboarding to avoid project implementation roadblocks

3. Uniform and standardised vendor and application framework

• Giga projects involves multiple entities and assets that may procure set of tools at business level

• Organisation should establish a list or  framework of preferred vendors ecosystem to avoid technology landscape complexity and ensure synergies across the organisation

It is imperative for giga players in the region to adopt the best practices for effective strategy, governance and technology execution. PwC has a proven track record in supporting giga projects in this region and globally and is the partner of choice to drive giga projects’ ambitious journeys.