The Execution Playbook: Delivering Billion-Dollar Programs with Discipline
By: Chuck Tkachuk, Senior Director, Strategic Large Programs
Robert Felton, SVP, Program Management
Jeff Hila, SVP, Field Services
Herschel Baxi, SVP, Programs Controls & Digital Delivery
The Execution Challenge
Utilities now face a capital delivery environment unlike any in the industry’s history. Programs that once took a decade to plan are being approved in months. Billion-dollar portfolios are the new baseline, not the exception. But scale alone doesn’t define the challenge. What makes these programs difficult is the sustained operational discipline required to deliver predictably across multiple years, hundreds of contracts, thousands of work fronts, and countless stakeholder touchpoints.
After more than a century of combined experience leading large-scale delivery organizations, we’ve learned this: strategy without execution discipline is just aspiration. The difference between programs that deliver and programs that struggle comes down to how well four operational pillars work together. This is the execution playbook.
Pillar One: Integrated Program Management
The Challenge: As programs scale beyond $1 billion, fragmentation becomes the default response. Owners divide work into dozens or hundreds of contracts, believing this spreads risk and maintains control. The opposite occurs as accountability diffuses, interfaces multiply, and no single view of program health exists.
What Works: Programs that deliver at scale consolidate management authority under one empowered program leader supported by a unified team. This doesn’t mean one contractor performs all work. It means one accountable structure orchestrates planning, execution, and closeout across all delivery partners. Benefits include:
Decision cycles compress when authority is clear
Forecasting accuracy improves when one team owns the baseline
Risk management becomes proactive when interfaces are actively managed
Contractor performance stays consistent when standards are uniformly applied
Industry Pattern: Utilities that rely solely on delivery contractors to forecast costs often face shifting baselines and persistent variance. Programs that use independent program managers to gather, validate, and consolidate contractor forecasts provide executives with one accountable version of the truth.
The Lesson: Fragmentation feels safe but creates the conditions for variance. Integration creates the conditions for discipline.
Pillar Two: Capacity Planning for Peak Complexity
The Challenge: Programs don’t fail at kickoff. They fail in Year 3 when workload peaks, engineering bottlenecks emerge, and the owner’s team, sized for average annual capital, suddenly faces twice the volume with the same staff. Reactive hiring, turnover, and knowledge loss are common.
What Works: Programs that sustain performance staff for maximum complexity, not average workload. Key practices include:
Modeling workforce needs across the full program timeline before mobilization
Building capacity ahead of need, not in response to crisis
Maintaining stable program leadership from Year 1 through closeout
Partnering strategically to supplement internal teams without creating dependency
Industry Pattern: Programs that plan and staff for peak workload sustain strong schedule performance even in the most demanding phases. Reactive staffing leads to missed milestones, rising costs, and stakeholder frustration.
The Lesson: Capacity is infrastructure. Build it before you need it.
Pillar Three: Field Execution Discipline
The Challenge: Billion-dollar programs ultimately succeed or fail in the field. Thousands of tasks across hundreds of miles of transmission corridors or dozens of substations must be executed safely, efficiently, and to specification, often by multiple contractors with different cultures, standards, and capabilities. Field execution breaks down when:
Constructability isn’t validated during design
Outage coordination fails to account for operations realities
Safety standards vary across contractors
Materials arrive late because long-lead procurement wasn’t tracked
Storm events pull crews away with no plan to restore momentum
What Works: Programs that deliver predictably integrate field discipline from the beginning:
Construction managers review designs before they’re locked
Outage planners coordinate with operations to build realistic windows with resilience buffers
One set of safety standards applies across all work fronts, enforced through daily oversight
Vegetation management aligns with construction schedules rather than operating independently
Storm response plans allow fast demobilization while preserving program continuity
The Lesson: Field execution isn’t the final step — it’s the lens through which all planning should be filtered.
Pillar Four: Controls and Digital Transparency
The Challenge: At billion-dollar scale, spreadsheets and manual reporting break. Consolidating dozens of contracts into one portfolio view becomes time-consuming. Variances reported to executives are often outdated, eroding confidence.
What Works: Disciplined programs establish integrated controls from day one:
Track cost, schedule, and risk in one system across all contracts
Use digital dashboards providing real-time visibility
Earned value management with CPI and SPI as early warning indicators
Formal change control processes before scope adjustments
Predictive analytics flag schedule or cost risks before they materialize
The Lesson: You can’t manage what you can’t see. Digital transparency turns program management from reactive to proactive.
How the Four Pillars Work Together
These pillars aren’t independent. They reinforce each other:
Integrated program management enables coordinated execution across capacity planning, field discipline, and controls
Capacity planning ensures sufficient bandwidth during peak complexity
Field execution validates that plans translate into reality
Program controls and digital transparency provide data for confident decision-making
When utilities invest in all four pillars, programs deliver predictably. Underinvest in any one, and the system weakens.
Why This Matters Now
The next decade will test utility delivery capacity at unprecedented scale:
Transmission corridors exceeding $10 billion
Nuclear programs approaching $30 billion
Grid modernization portfolios in the tens of billions
Metrics will be unforgiving: Did it come in on budget? On schedule? As promised? The utilities that succeed will be those that recognize execution discipline as the foundation of delivery.
The CARIAN Approach
At CARIAN, we built our organization around these four pillars. Our model provides operational discipline required for billion-dollar programs:
Integration: One accountable program manager coordinating multiple delivery partners.
Capacity: Teams sized for peak program complexity with long-term experience.
Field Discipline: Construction managers embedded from design through closeout.
Program Controls & Digital: Integrated systems providing real-time visibility and predictive analytics.
We measure success like our clients: cost discipline, schedule certainty, safety performance, and stakeholder confidence sustained across years.
Conclusion
Billion-dollar programs demand operational excellence across all four dimensions. Miss any one pillar, and the program becomes vulnerable. The utilities defining the next decade will be those that recognize execution discipline isn’t overhead — it’s the foundation of delivery at scale. That’s the playbook. Four pillars. One integrated approach. Outcomes that earn trust.
