Among all Riyadh city projects, I’m excited about Sports Boulevard the most. I believe it will contribute to lifestyle, quality of life, and will hopefully help bring us some medals in future Olympics.🥇

But until then, all we’ll get is traffic and congestion 🚧. So, no contribution to the Olympics, and a negative contribution to quality of life.

But I can understand why this is happening. The initiative proposes a grand plan that takes years to build. Realizing this, they work in phases. It is easy to justify and convince that a phase will take this much time and effort. This leads to periods with nothing delivered.

Instead, I believe the focus should be on VALUE.

What value can be provided on day 100? day 500? day 2,000?

Instead of one mega plan, there should be multiple ones like a Baby plan, a Mommy plan, and a Daddy plan. Work does not have to be incremental; every plan is the full version of itself. Subsequent plans can replace previous ones.

I like the execution of the Boulevard. It was delivered rapidly, and each year the project got bigger and better. We used to park in a wasteland in year 1, and now Boulevard has some of the best parking spaces in the city. Some of the Boulevard was rebuilt better.

So what does that mean for Sports Boulevard? It means having tennis and basketball courts today. Not when phase 1 is done. Today.

Providing value today also gives more resilience with respect to budget cuts and reallocations. If for any reason this project gets a budget cut, it would still be operational, providing some value.

I’m very excited about Sports Boulevard, and I wish to see some of it delivered very soon.