Raising the Game in Capital Delivery: Ten Years of Independent Project Reviews. | Downloadable Article

Independent Project Reviews (IPRs) offer decision-grade assurance at the moments that matter. This article distils a ten-year longitudinal dataset of 73 IPRs across mining, infrastructure, and energy, harmonising 1,266 findings from six legacy registers into a 20-discipline taxonomy and analysing only High/Significant/Medium items. The evidence concentrates in Capital Estimating (thin Basis-of-Estimate provenance, excessive allowances, weak benchmarking, unclear contingency) and a second band – Scope & WBS, Engineering, and Schedule—that exposes a single root cause: front-end misalignment and unrealistic durations. Gaps in constructability, procurement/contracting, and governance (unsigned baselines) undermine execution readiness, while Operational Readiness is often late, generic, and under-resourced. Most issues are systemic and fixable if surfaced and closed before approval, a smaller set of high-severity items must be resolved at approval milestones (stage gates). These patterns mirror external benchmarks (Merrow/IPA, Flyvbjerg, McKinsey), which link outcome shortfalls to front-end weakness. We conclude with a practical agenda: embed IPRs at Concept/Pre-Feas/Feas, enforce reference-class benchmarking, make constructability and VE design milestones, start OR in FEL2, and track closure of conditions prior to approvals—moves that materially improve predictability and capital efficiency.