How to Know if your Projects Suffer from Cowboy Commissioning

If your projects are:

• Consistently late by more than 1 month
• Typically over-budget by more than $1M
• You’re scrambling at the end during commissioning to meet deadlines
• You’re not achieving the reliability needed for ongoing operation and maintenance activities

Then I guarantee you’re doing one or more of the following:

• You’re figuring out how to complete your projects only after they’ve already been started (after contracts have been awarded)
• You’re allowing your engineering team to complete designs in isolation with no input from your commissioning team or operations team
• You’re involving your commissioning team only once construction is closer to being completed
• You’re allowing construction activities to determine commissioning
• You’re planning your project sequence from left to right, rather than from right to left
• You’re ending up with only half the time required for commissioning and having to bypass some tests to try to meet deadlines

What’s happening right now in the construction and commissioning industry is that everyone is repeating what has always been done on past projects. But when less than 10% of projects are delivered on-time and on-budget, this clearly is not a good idea.

Maybe there were lessons learned gathered at the end of the previous project, but these are filed away and forgotten about for the next project. The cycle continues with projects being completed as they have always been done – late and over-budget.

Projects are complex, and there are a lot of other things going on.

Some of the mistakes in the construction and commissioning industry are things like:

• Commissioning only takes place after construction is complete
• Construction activities determine when and how commissioning takes place
• Don’t worry about that, we’ll figure it out later – commissioning will fix it at the end of the project.
• We can skip some tests – just turn it on and we’ll see what happens

Although these actions will eventually finish projects, the project will be late and over-budget with unreliable systems, and no one really understands the implications of these decisions until after the project is already many months late and millions of dollars over-budget – but then these same decisions are made on the next projects with exactly the same outcomes – late and over-budget.

For example:

• How can on-site commissioning be expected to go smoothly when equipment procurement contracts are missing tests to be done in the factory – all defects and deficiencies that should have been fixed in the factory are instead deferred to site?
• How is commissioning expected to be completed when there are missing design details or missing functionality in systems?
• Why is it common for the commissioning team to identify and fix construction quality issues rather than proactively identify these during installation to avoid delays later?
• And how can the commissioning team be expected to swiftly and promptly complete the project in a few short months if they are not given the time and resources to prepare in advance?

So there is definitely a narrative that is embedded within the construction and commissioning industry that perpetuates this broken cycle of late and over-budget projects.

It’s this narrative that is causing problems and preventing projects from being successful, and we need to look at the deeper reasons as to why this problem exists.

Maybe this approach to completing projects did work at one point. And it kind of still works now for some projects, but the deeper problem that’s created from this narrative is that today’s projects are much more complex and “winging it” in the field with Cowboy Commissioning can no longer get the job done.

The narratives inside the industry that may have been true at one point, are no longer true and we must go deeper to understand what is required to successfully complete today’s complex projects.

Project teams keep doing the same on projects, only because they don’t know what else to do – it’s always been done that way.

Projects are stuck with Cowboy Commissioning, which is when projects lack a structured commissioning process through all stages of projects. Projects that suffer from Cowboy Commissioning leave commissioning to the end of the project and scramble to figure out how to finish the project in the last few months that remain. Projects that do not start with the end in mind and do not ensure successful commissioning is always the main priority and goal of all project groups quickly fall into the trap of Cowboy Commissioning.

Cowboy Commissioning is a massive problem that’s going on in the industry, and I want to help as many people as possible defeat this problem. This is only possible by first realizing that there is a problem in the construction and commissioning industry, and then seeking out new solutions for better project outcomes. It is no longer acceptable to “target” to meet an environmental license requirement, it is expected that project teams will do what is required to ensure dates are met.

To avoid project delays and cost overruns, we must avoid getting stuck with Cowboy Commissioning. You need an anchor, a process to start with, that you can use and adapt, specific to your projects.  We show you how to do this.