What makes commissioning (and projects in general) successful?

Is it the tools you use?

Is it the processes you follow?

Is it the industry or specific technical details that you’re working on?

Nope. None of these!

What makes projects successful is the people working on projects – the skills they have and their ability to work well with others to accomplish great things together. And particularly the leaders working on projects to ensure everyone is aligned and working towards the same goal.

A capital project and a business startup are similar, in that the people working on both is what determines if each of these are successful.

Business startups require a team of people with specific talents and have done it before – product development leaders, marketing and sales leaders, finance leaders, all led by the founder/CEO.

Projects require the same – design leaders, procurement leaders, construction leaders, commissioning leaders, all led by the project manager.

Board members, led by the chairman of the board, govern the direction of business startups, the same way that the project sponsor leads a steering committee that governs the direction of a capital project.

One big difference though is that business startups are all playing for the same team trying to accomplish the same goal – a profitable company that provides value to customers and is a great place to work. But capital projects are made up of several contracts which divide the players into different teams. Because of these divisions, capital projects require even stronger leaders to inspire all groups and keep everyone aligned on the end goal of completing projects on-time and on-budget.

The construction industry does not seem to have the same approach to leadership as the business startup world. Venture capital groups notoriously scrutinize the founder or founders to determine if they will invest in the company. They’ll scrutinize the founder even more than they’ll scrutinize the business idea.  Leaders on projects do not seem to get this same level of scrutiny by the group that is funding the project, even though capital projects can have MULTI-BILLION dollar investments, often much bigger than multi-million dollar business startup investments.

When business ventures fail, the company goes bankrupt. When projects fail, they are given more money to get the job done. Business founders are unlikely to be funded for their next business venture with a failed track-record. But project leaders that fail move on to their next project with very little consequences.

Many capital projects are required to be built over the next several decades, but there are only a limited number of project leaders with the track-record to successfully deliver projects. With a shortage of skilled labour, what are capital projects supposed to do?

We need to give our project leaders every advantage we can to make them successful. We need to mentor our strong and dynamic leaders so they can inspire large teams, and have every piece of knowledge we can give them to set them up for success.

This is exactly why we created the Commissioning Academy – to mentor project leaders through the complexity of completing capital project commissioning so they can focus on leading teams to accomplish great things. With all the challenges to successfully deliver capital projects on-time and on-budget, poorly planned commissioning should not be one of the reasons that projects fail.