A simple, scalable way to uncover the hardest-to-detect risks before Final Investment Decision (FID).
If your organization uses Project Definition Rating Index (PDRI), you already know its value: stronger alignment, fewer surprises, and improved cost and schedule certainty.
But many owners quietly acknowledge a persistent issue:
Every few years, a project with a strong PDRI score at FID still becomes a serious outlier.
Nothing is harder than explaining to executives how this happens despite your robust capital project governance process.
This is the exact problem the Construction Industry Institute (CII) set out to address.
CII’s research revealed a critical gap in traditional governance:
Even when scope maturity is high, the quality of scope deliverables can still vary significantly, often driven by human factors, organizational dynamics, leadership alignment, and capability constraints.
These conditions rarely appear in maturity scoring, yet they consistently show up in the root causes of major capital project outliers. In other words, deliverables may be “complete,” but the underlying conditions influencing their quality can still be weak.
Traditional governance systems tend to rely heavily on deliverable checklists and other lagging indicators, leaving a blind spot around the early behavioral and organizational factors that ultimately drive FEED quality and cost/schedule performance.
To close this gap, CII introduced the PDRI Accuracy section to answer an essential predictive-governance question:
“How confident are we in the quality of scope deliverables?”
By combining Scope Maturity + Accuracy, owners gain a much stronger set of leading indicators – a predictive mechanism that surfaces conditions correlated with cost and schedule deviations and gives gate reviewers clearer, early insight to support confident decisions prior to FID.
Accuracy also provides executives and Boards with assurance that FEED deliverables have been assessed not only for completeness, but for the underlying conditions strongly correlated with performance deviations.
With over $68B in project value assessed by Valency’s facilitators, two things are clear:
These conditions often remain invisible until after Front End Planning is completed, when it is far more costly to correct course.
Accuracy is designed to surface these conditions early, when project leadership can still take meaningful action. This is why Accuracy functions as a practical early-warning system and one of the few leading indicators correlated with preventing project outliers.
Insights like these typically emerge in less than a couple of hours with the core leadership team, yet they have major implications for FEED quality and outlier prevention.
Accuracy Factor: 1d — Leadership Team & Culture
A large industrial project in Concept (FEL-2) had a highly respected SME assigned to several critical FEED deliverables.
But during the Accuracy discussion, the team acknowledged the SME was also supporting multiple priority initiatives, limiting their availability for design reviews.
Behavioural science shows that when critical resources are stretched:
Outcome: Leadership adjusted resourcing ahead of Detailed Scope (FEL-3).
The issue had not become visible in maturity scoring, but Accuracy surfaced it early enough for proactive action.
Accuracy Factor: 1a — Experience Planning, Designing & Executing
A joint venture project completing Concept (FEL-2) had experienced leaders from three partner companies. Scope development was progressing well.
But the Accuracy discussion revealed something scope maturity would never catch:
the leadership team had not yet developed a shared project culture.
Different norms around design reviews, communication, and decision-making were creating friction and slowing alignment.
Outcome: The Steering Committee prioritized cultural alignment at the start of Detailed Scope (FEL-3), significantly improving decision quality and pace.
Accuracy Factor: 1a — Experience Planning, Designing & Executing
A major decarbonization project involved proven technology, but new to the Owner. Engineering capability was strong, but the Accuracy discussion surfaced a key gap:
operational experience with this specific technology was missing.
Without operational insight, teams often underestimate integration complexity.
Outcome: The project engaged an external SME to strengthen operational input, improving FEED quality and confidence heading into Detailed Scope (FEL-3).
CII recommends achieving a minimum 76% Accuracy score by Detailed Scope (FEL-3), based on research validated across 44 industrial projects representing $13.9B TIC.
Accuracy Score
Many owners now add Accuracy at the end of Concept (FEL-2), where early-warning signals have the greatest impact.
Accuracy is simple to incorporate and closes one of the largest persistent gaps owners face: early detection of quality risks that often drive outlier performance.
For organizations using PDRI portfolio-wide, the challenge is consistency and repeatability.
That’s why many owners now rely on Carve for PDRI, which:
This is powerful because behavioral and team-condition indicators are among the earliest predictors of project performance issues. Carve gives PMOs a consistent way to surface these early signals and move from reactive governance to predictive project assurance.
Many executives are surprised to learn their organization isn’t using it yet.
Accuracy is one of the simplest and highest-impact ways to reduce the probability of capital project outliers.
If your organization isn’t using it or isn’t using it consistently across midsize or larger projects, it’s worth asking why.
Adding the Accuracy review at PDRI-2 and PDRI-3 requires no changes to your stage-gate structure and typically takes less than two hours with the leadership team, making it one of the simplest improvements a PMO can implement to strengthen predictability.
And if you’re not yet using PDRI, it remains Valency’s top recommendation for Owners seeking to improve predictability across their capital portfolios.
If you’d like to explore how Accuracy works or how Carve operationalizes it using Hybrid Intelligence, we’d be happy to walk your team through it.