An Organizational Capability for Converting
Project Success into Sustainable
Operational Performance
FEATURED PAPER
By David Tain
Alberta, Canada
Why Does Operational Performance Still Lag Behind Project Success?
Across industries, organizations continue to spend significant amounts of capital to build new infrastructure for producing assets. Sophisticated methodologies and increasingly rigorous governance frameworks have supported the delivery of these projects, along with major advances in engineering, digital technologies, and construction practices. All this has substantially improving the ability to deliver scopes on time and on budget. Despite this, however, a persistent paradox remains present that restrains and inhibits the full materialization of value: projects that are widely regarded as successful frequently struggle to achieve the operational performance they were intended to create.
This paradox is recurrent across virtually every industry: Oil and Gas facilities that take months, or even years, to reach planned levels of production; healthcare facilities that experience prolonged stabilization periods before achieving expected levels of service; and airports that had to stop operations in day one due to failures in activation protocols are just a few sectors where these challenges materialize. Physical assets that have been completed continue to struggle in realizing the outcomes that justified the investment. These issues are rarely attributable to a single source of failure. Instead, they emerge at the interactions of various technical, organizational, human, and managerial elements whose aggregated contribution influence how of these newly delivered projects will transition to live operations.
On the other hand, how transition of projects to live operations are managed and controlled often rely on traditional project metrics, providing an incomplete view of how the project and the organization itself will create value after start-up. Schedule performance, cost control, construction progress, and commissioning completion among others are essential indicators of project execution, yet none of them demonstrate that an organization is genuinely capable of sustaining safe, reliable, and value-generating operations. As projects grow in scale and complexity, it becomes more cumbersome to understand, measure and control the performance of complex networks, within the project and the whole execution ecosystem, that interconnect multiple stakeholders whose interactions emerge asynchronously and extend beyond mechanical completion. Success depends therefore on ensuring that the organization itself develops capabilities to operate, maintain, govern, and continuously improve the asset under real operating conditions, beyond the delivery of the physical asset.
It is precisely within this transition that many organizations experience what may be considered the last mile of capital projects: the critical period separating successful project delivery from sustainable operational performance. Challenges experienced in this final stage often remain largely invisible during project execution, appearing only after the project has been declared complete in the form of delays in production ramp-up and stabilization, operational disruptions and, in the worst cases, safety incidents. These issues are essentially the result of a lack of readiness to absorb and operate the delivered asset. In response, organizations have progressively developed a wide variety of Operational Readiness activities, with a main focus on operators training, commissioning, procedures development, maintenance preparation, in an attempt to close the distance in this “last mile” by effectively addressing emergent situations during start-up and transition to live operations
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How to cite this paper: Tain, D. (2026). Toward a Unified Conceptualization of Operational Readiness: An Organizational Capability for Converting Project Success into Sustainable Operational Performance; PM World Journal, Vol. XV, Issue IX, September. Available online at https://pmworldjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/pmwj168-Sep2026-Tain-Unified-Conceptualization-of-Operational-Readiness.pdf
About the Author
David Tain
Alberta, Canada
David Tain is the Chairman of the Technical Committee of the Institute for Commissioning and Assurance (ICxA) and Vice president of the Institute for Latin America and the Mediterranean Region. He is also the Director of Septentrion Strategic Solutions LTD, a global Strategic management firm specialized in Operational Readiness and Project Execution (www.septentrionglobal.com)
With over 25 years of on-shore and off-shore experience in Canada, South America and Europe, David has extensive expertise in developing and implementing Operational Readiness programs and in delivering projects in all phases, working alongside multinational energy organizations including Shell, Total E&P, ConocoPhillips, Suncor, AMEC, Statoil and PDVSA
David is a Civil Engineer from Santa Maria University in Venezuela, a MSc. in Management from University of Liverpool, UK and completed the Strategic Decision and Risk Management Professional Program at Stanford University, USA. He is also a Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute and holds the Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) designation from the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists (APEGA) in Canada.
David Tain can be contacted at taindavid@yahoo.com
