The world has never built like this before.
Across sectors and geographies, large-scale assets are being developed at unprecedented speed, scale, and complexity. In 2026, transport, energy, industrial, and residential assets are expected to attract more than $7 trillion in combined capital investment. Yet the sharper shift is not scale. It is expectations. Assets must ramp revenue quickly, satisfy regulators, protect reputation, and perform safely and reliably from day one. The tolerance for disruption has collapsed.
The delivery record has not kept pace. Only around one in twelve large-scale projects is delivered on time and on budget. When assets struggle at launch, they do so in full view of the stakeholders who matter most. But opening day rarely creates failure. It reveals it. The conditions that shape operational performance are formed much earlier, in demand assumptions, operating-model choices, design trade-offs, sequencing decisions, and governance structures set long before the ribbon is cut. By launch, many of those choices are already locked into layouts, capacities, interfaces, systems, and readiness plans.
We examine this pattern through four highly visible projects: FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, Expo 2020 Dubai, Istanbul Airport, and Fontainebleau Las Vegas.
Qatar 2022 and Expo 2020 Dubai show the value of embedding operational viability early. The Qatar program integrated national planning, demand modeling, infrastructure delivery, operator capability, and live-event testing over a decade-long horizon. Expo 2020 Dubai translated visitor forecasts into a detailed Concept of Operations, service levels, accountabilities, and escalation pathways years before opening. In both cases, operational assumptions were stress-tested while there was still time to adjust.
Istanbul Airport and Fontainebleau Las Vegas show the cost of embedding operations too late. Istanbul Airport entered operations while construction, commissioning, and system integration were still ongoing, pushing accumulated risk into live operations. Fontainebleau faced a different but related challenge: repeated ownership changes and strategic resets forced a new operating model onto legacy infrastructure, compressing redesign, construction, activation, and workforce readiness into the final push before opening. In both cases, operational risk became visible only when flexibility had narrowed and recovery had become expensive.
The implication is structural, not cultural. Projects that perform from day one are not simply better managed at launch. They are better designed from the start. Operational viability cannot be bolted on at the end. It must be embedded from strategy through construction, where assumptions are set, trade-offs are made, and flexibility is either preserved or lost. Yet in many capital programs, operational viability is still treated as an expected outcome of delivery rather than as an explicit design requirement.
BCG’s Asset Ops360 is designed to close this gap. The framework assesses operational viability across three dimensions: the full project lifecycle, the asset’s operating components, and the functions that must contribute at the right time. Together, these dimensions produce a quantified viability profile that makes risk visible earlier, when intervention still has impact. By stress-testing assumptions before they become commitments and surfacing gaps while they are still cheap to close, Asset Ops360 shifts intervention from opening day to the design table, making operational viability systematic, transferable, and measurable.
For the next generation of large-scale assets, the ribbon is not the starting line. It is the moment when every upstream decision becomes visible. The question is not whether to consider operations. It is how early.
Read the full paper to explore the four case studies and learn how Asset Ops360 helps leaders manage operational risk where it can still be shaped: upstream, before decisions are locked in.