By Conrad Gardner

Experts discussed the state of the GCC projects market and the role of advanced project control systems in ensuring delivery certainty in a recent webinar.

Titled ‘Delivering more certainty in giga and mega projects’, the event was hosted by MEED in partnership with Contruent on 22 October, and brought together Jack Pollock, general manager, Emea, Contruent, and Ed James, head of content and research at MEED.

Ed James provided a statistical overview of record-breaking contract awards in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, emphasising the scale of the GCC market where project spending reached $330bn in 2024, and the region’s long-term pipeline climbed to a record $3.4tn.

The webinar explored how organisations can bring structure to complex project data. Jack Pollock detailed how integrated cost-management tools drive accountability, governance and visibility across large infrastructure programmes, explaining that baseline budgets serve as the primary control against which all progress and variations are monitored.

“Everything flows from the estimate,” said Pollock. “It provides a symbiotic loop: capture your costs as you progress, then revalidate your original estimates.”

Pollock also highlighted that establishing a regular reporting “drumbeat” – including early-month actuals collection and a reporting close in week three – replaces manual data collation with a structured review of forecast quality, risk and required interventions.

“The whole avoiding failure, avoiding overspends, avoiding overruns, all of that comes from capturing data, marshalling it into a single environment, and being able to then review, interrogate and communicate from that space,” he noted.

The discussion covered the governance disciplines required to translate data into effective decisions, supported by practical case studies demonstrating the value of this approach.

The session concluded by highlighting that as GCC programmes grow in scale and interdependence, delivery certainty will depend on far more than basic budget tracking. Instead, it will require connected data, disciplined change control and forward-looking insight across costs, schedules, supply chains and risk.

Missed the live session? Watch the full webinar here to discover how Contruent’s cost-management framework can help manage project complexity