Prioritizing Critical Front-End Planning Activities in Saudi Megaprojects

Front-End Planning (FEP) is the very early stage of delivering megaprojects, during which strategic decisions are made that can dictate the project’s overall costs and timelines over the lifetime of the project. While existing FEP frameworks provide valuable insights into managing FEPs in Western nations, they have never been validated by reviewing Saudi Arabia’s unique environment, where large-scale projects are characterized by complicated multi-agency coordination systems and rapid timelines due to Vision 2030 initiatives. This exploratory research examines which FEP activities are most strongly associated with cost and schedule variances in Saudi megaprojects. A quantitative survey was administered to 35 respondents who have experience working on projects with a minimum of SAR 1 billion in capital cost to evaluate the quality of 33 FEP activities organized into five domains. Cronbach’s alpha validated domain composite scores, with four of five domains demonstrating good to excellent reliability (α = 0.73 to 0.91); the Technical Planning domain (α = 0.583) was excluded from regression analysis due to insufficient internal consistency. Multiple regression analysis examined associations between domain composites and project outcomes. Schedule performance was significantly associated with FEP quality (R2 = 0.34, p = 0.012), with Project Planning showing a large negative association (β = −0.80, p = 0.002) and Business Planning showing a significant positive association (β = 0.75, p = 0.031). However, sensitivity analysis revealed that the Project Planning finding was substantially dependent on a single influential observation, while the Business Planning association remained robust across model specifications. The cost model did not reach statistical significance (p = 0.305), attributable in part to insufficient statistical power (achieved power = 0.40). Ownership type was not significant after controlling for FEP quality. The findings suggest that Project Planning activities, including scope compilation, preliminary execution planning, cost estimation, and master scheduling, may be associated with reduced schedule variance, though this association requires confirmation with larger samples. A preliminary four-tier prioritized framework is proposed to guide resource allocation during front-end phases while acknowledging the exploratory nature of the evidence base.