Canada has built itself a Major Projects Office to do the thing every government dreams about: get nationally significant projects approved and moving faster. Energy, critical minerals, transport corridors, the kind of infrastructure that usually spends a decade crawling through permits. The office exists to streamline that crawl, to coordinate across jurisdictions, to shrink the gap between idea and shovel. A sensible answer to a real problem.
But the analysis around it came with a warning worth pinning above your desk, drawn from the post-mortems of megaprojects all over the world. Speed of approval does not buy success in delivery. A faster yes, on its own, just gets you to the start line of a project that can still fail in every way projects fail. And the history of megaprojects shows the same handful of failures repeating, no matter how quickly the thing got waved through.
I find that clarifying, because it names a confusion sitting at the heart of a lot of project trouble. We treat getting approved as if it were getting delivered. The approval gets celebrated, the announcement gets made, everyone moves on as though the hard part is behind them. But approval is the easy part. Approval is a decision. Delivery is a decade of disciplined work, and the decision to start tells you almost nothing about whether that work will be done well.
The recurring megaproject failures the analysis points to are the ones every experienced delivery hand could recite half asleep. Optimism bias, where cost and schedule get set too low at the outset because low numbers are what get a project approved. Scope that mutates endlessly because the design got locked before it was mature, under pressure to commit. Weak change control. Risk assumptions baked in too early, when the least is known. And every one of those failures lives in delivery, not in approval. Speeding up the yes does nothing to fix any of them. It can make them worse, by shoving projects across the start line before the thinking that prevents these failures has actually been done.
This is the trap of polishing the wrong stage. Approval is visible, political and satisfying to speed up. You can announce a faster approval. You can cut a ribbon on a streamlined process. So that’s where the attention and the reform tend to flow. Meanwhile the part that actually decides success, the long unglamorous grind of delivery with honest estimates, mature scope, real change control and clear-eyed risk, gets far less love. Governments and organisations keep making the front door faster while the house behind it keeps falling down.
The lesson the analysis lands on is the right one. Faster approvals are worth something only if they come paired with everything that makes delivery succeed: strong governance, realistic risk, clear accountability, stakeholder alignment, honest long-term metrics. Speed at the front, discipline all the way through. Speed without the discipline just gets you to failure faster, with more momentum behind it and less time to pull up.
I’d put it more bluntly, for any project at any size. The day your project gets approved, you’ve achieved nothing yet. You’ve won the right to attempt the actual work. The approval felt like the finish line because it was hard to get and everyone clapped, but it was the start line, and the race that matters is the delivery you haven’t run. Teams that confuse the two coast on the approval, relax precisely when they should be tightening, and find out too late that getting the yes was never the hard part.
So when your project gets its yes, kill the urge to treat it as the win. Treat it as the moment the real work starts, and pour your discipline into the delivery, where success actually gets decided. Getting approved faster is a fine thing. Just never mistake it for getting delivered. The projects that fail are almost never the ones that couldn’t get approved. They’re the ones that got approved and then weren’t delivered well.
Related reading
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Ben Webb is a Sydney-based project leader and strategist, named Australian Institute of Project Management Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for the International Project Management Association’s World Project Manager of the Year in 2023. He writes about delivery, leadership and getting things done.
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