The Delivery Engine - powering growth for Saudi development companies

Executive summary

Mandated by Vision 2030 and funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, development companies in the Kingdom are operating at a pace and scale unprecedented in the region. They are expected to build cities, deliver infrastructure, attract investment and demonstrate measurable progress under intense public and shareholder scrutiny.

In this environment, strategic ambition is not the differentiator. The real test is whether these organisations have the institutional capacity to translate ambition into a prioritised portfolio, clear ownership, disciplined governance and verifiable outcomes. 

This challenge is not unique to Saudi Arabia. According to PMI’s 2025 global research, only 50% of projects meet a modern definition of success, reinforcing the scale of the delivery gap facing large, complex organisations. 

For growth-phase DevCos, delivery discipline has become a strategic capability. For leaders, the priority is to build the delivery model before portfolios become harder to control. That means making governance decision-led, standardising data before scaling technology, building resilience into the delivery rhythm and transferring capability into the organisation from day one.

This publication argues that delivery discipline is not only a project management function. It is a strategic capability that must be designed, resourced and governed with the same rigour applied to strategy itself. PwC’s DevCo Delivery Engine (see Figure 1) organises this capability across four interdependent pillars – delivery architecture, delivery mobilisation, AI-enabled delivery intelligence and resilience and business continuity. Taken together, these connect annual planning, portfolio governance, decision rights, performance data, risk management and benefits realisation.

The framework is organised around four connected questions that DevCo leaders need to answer as they move from strategy to scaled delivery.

Figure 1. PwC’s DevCo Delivery Engine framework

This publication illustrates the framework through a case study drawn from PwC’s work with a large, growth-phase DevCo. Within a single fiscal year, PwC helped design and mobilise the complete connected delivery model, ensuring measurable impact: 88% average realisation across six anonymised strategic objectives including 100% on financial returns, 97% on partnerships, and 96% on economic development and sustainability, with approximately 70% of corporate KPIs on track at year-end.