Matt Jacobs
BY MATT JACOBS
“The plans exist and the funding frameworks are in place.
The open question is whether the way we deliver infrastructure is built for a job of this size and pace.”
The scale of the task is not in dispute. NESO estimates that the transmission build to 2030 needs up to £60 billion to deliver around 1,000 km of onshore and more than 4,500 km of offshore network and enabling works, more than double everything built in the last ten years (1).
The plans exist and the funding frameworks are in place. The open question is whether the way we deliver infrastructure is built for a job of this size and pace.
History suggests caution. Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner’s study of 16,000 projects found that only 8.5% met their original time and budget estimates, and just 0.5% delivered on time, cost and promised benefits (2).
These are not isolated execution slips. They are the predictable output of a delivery system designed for a more stable world. When things go wrong, the usual response is more planning and more control. It rarely works, because the plan was never the constraint.
“A product, not a project”
The shift we think matters most is simple to state. A project is temporary: fixed scope, fixed budget, a defined end, and a team that disbands at handover. A product is a long-lived asset expected to deliver and grow value from conception to retirement, cared for by a persistent team.
By that definition, the grid is a product. It is never finished. Every new circuit, substation and reinforcement is a release into a live system that must keep working while it changes, and that will keep changing for decades. The grid has two kinds of customers: the generators that need a way to move power from its source, and the people who need that power at the other end. Its value is measured in usable capacity, delivered connections and relieved constraints, not in milestones passed.
Yet we tend to fund, contract, govern and staff it as a long sequence of temporary projects, each judged complete at energisation. The people who learned hard lessons on one scheme disperse before the next begins. The question “did we deliver the plan?” crowds out a more useful one: “is the network delivering value, and is it getting better?”
“The ideas are already in the building”
None of this is foreign to the sector. National Grid Electricity Transmission’s December 2025 DSAP Action Plan reports that all of its teams now work using scaled Agile practices, including the digital teams in its Strategic Infrastructure business. The same plan describes digital products supporting the Great Grid Upgrade: visualisation tools for consenting, a common data environment shared with delivery partners across the accelerated transmission portfolio, and building information modelling for design (3).
SSEN Transmission’s digital strategy commits to fully digitising the processes behind its large-scale capital projects (4).
That is real progress, and it shows the sector knows how to work iteratively and think in products. But notice where those practices mostly live: in the digital teams and the tools that support capital delivery. The harder question is whether the lessons are reaching the capital delivery system itself: how schemes are prioritised, how teams are formed, how decisions are governed, and how value is measured. Digitising a project-based delivery model makes it faster at being project-based. It does not turn it into a product delivery organisation.
Ciudad Cayalá in Guatemala shows this can be done in physical infrastructure. With more than seven projects under construction at once, its leaders found that more planning was not the answer. They began running the city as a product. Ownership was aligned to value delivered. A prioritised backlog drove execution, not chance. Construction ran in short, predictable cycles, and impediments were removed during execution rather than discovered after it.
The city keeps improving for its residents because no one ever declared it complete.
The same pattern shows up in energy. In an article I co-authored this year with BCG and Straits Consulting, we described two examples (5).
At one energy company, success measures shifted from milestone completion to system readiness and first-time quality, and cross-functional, product-focused teams kept design, procurement and construction moving together. At a lithium extraction plant, work was restructured into product modules with clear owners, delivered in quarterly cycles with a stakeholder review at the end of each.
With clearer ownership, fewer people had to sign off on each decision, and delivery sped up.
“A strategy that is not executed is worthless. The grid is a product. It is time we built the organisations to deliver it like one”
That article set out five changes to how capital projects are delivered.5 Applied to the grid, they look like this:
1. Decrease time to value
Treat each new enhancement as a contained increment of value delivered, not a step to a much larger future goal which does not provide direct value to customers.
2. Build persistent, cross-functional teams
Give teams that span engineering, consenting, procurement, construction and operations end-to-end ownership of a part of the network through its life, so learning compounds instead of walking out of the door at handover.
3. Design for configuration, not customisation
Standard, modular designs let each new substation or circuit be configured from proven components. National Grid’s stated next step of embedding digital substations into its standard substation designs points in exactly this direction.3
4. Govern in short cycles with real data
Replace long intervals between stage gates with frequent reviews of working progress, and remove impediments in days rather than months. Some of this will push the boundaries of how regulation and funding work today. That conversation is worth having openly with regulators rather than avoiding.
5. Prioritise across the portfolio
NESO’s pathway to 2030 stands at 88 transmission schemes, all competing for the same outage windows, supply chain capacity and scarce people.1 A single, transparent priority order across that portfolio beats every scheme optimising for its own plan.
Strategy gets the attention. Delivery systems mostly get inherited. Few organisations deliberately design the way they deliver capital work. It accumulates through contracts, gate processes and habits built for a different era.
The organisations that meet 2030 will be the ones that design their delivery system with the same care as their investment plan. Four questions to start with:
• What are your teams actually measured on?
• How long does it take to surface an impediment and remove it?
• Where does learning go when a scheme is energised?
• Would your Agile teams and your capital delivery teams recognise each other’s way of working?
Matt Jacobs is Chief Product Officer at Scrum Inc.
References
1. NESO, Clean Power 2030 advice. neso.energy/document/346796/download
2. B. Flyvbjerg and D. Gardner, How Big Things Get Done (2023).
3. National Grid Electricity Transmission, DSAP Action Plan, December 2025. nationalgrid.com/document/566731/download
4. SSEN Transmission, Digital Strategy, March 2024. https://www.ssen-transmission.co.uk/globalassets/digital-strategy--action-plan-updates/ssen-transmission--digital-strategy-march-2024-.pdf
5. N. Kataeva, M. Tonegutti, J. Wulff, S. A. Kok, E. Abramowich and M. Jacobs, “Fixing Large Capital Projects Isn’t About More Planning. It’s About a New Approach to Delivery,” BCG, 14 April 2026. bcg.com/publications/2026/fixing-large-capital-projects-is-about-a-new-approach