In this article, I’m breaking down the key messages that Professor Bent Flyvbjerg makes in his book – How Big Things Get Done, and how these are applied during the Integrated Commissioning Method.

This article is going to be very powerful if your projects are consistently late and over-budget.  Over several decades, Prof Flyvbjerg’s has compiled a database of over 16,000 projects from 20-plus different fields in 136 countries on all continents.

Prof Flyvbjerg summarizes his findings from this database of projects as follows:

In total, only 8.5 percent of projects hit the mark on both cost and time. And a minuscule 0.5 percent nail cost, time, and benefits. Or to put that another way, 91.5 percent of projects go over budget, over schedule, or both. And 99.5 percent of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these.

So let’s extend Flyvbjerg’s analysis and see how commissioning plays a role in this.

THE WINDOW DOOM

Flyvbjerg makes the following statement:

Projects that fail tend to drag on, while those that succeed zip along and finish. Why is that? Think of the duration of a project as an open window. The longer the duration, the more open the window. The more open the window, the more opportunity for something to crash through and cause trouble. Solution? Close the window.

The window of projects is closed upon successful commissioning and startup of the plant process. Only once the systems are placed into service and handed over to operations is the “project window” closed. What this means is that all preceding phases of projects – procurement, design, and construction – are for the intention to achieve successful commissioning and startup.

The takeaway from Flyvbjerg’s statement is that successful commissioning must be in everyone’s clear view of the project as the end goal to close the “project window” and achieve project completion. Without commissioning being front and center in every discussion during all early stages of the project, the project team is not focused on the correct priorities and the duration of the “Window of Doom” unnecessarily becomes longer, with the potential for bad things to happen.

A BIAS AGAINST THINKING

There is always a preference on projects for action – get things done. And this is a good thing, we want people to act with a sense of urgency to meet deadlines and achieve objectives. But before rushing into the field and testing equipment, we need to clearly define what the objectives are.

Flyvbjerg makes this statement:

There is a preference for doing over talking—sometimes distilled into the phrase “bias for action”—is an idea as common in business as it is necessary. Wasted time can be dangerous. “Speed matters in business,” notes one of Amazon’s famous leadership principles, written by Jeff Bezos.

Everyone involved in a project should have that desire [a bias for action]. It becomes trouble only when we belittle planning as the annoying stuff we have to deal with before we really get going on the project. Planning is working on the project. Progress in planning is progress on the project, often the most cost-effective progress you can achieve. We lose sight of these facts at our peril.

This bias is quite common on projects – it is the industry-norm to belittle planning. I hear this often on projects – why waste time talking about the work instead of actually doing the work?

The problem with this is that commissioning is complex. It cannot be figured out on-the-fly. For projects to achieve efficiency during on-site testing, there is a significant amount of planning that must take place so that testing in the field is well coordinated amongst all groups that are involved so that commissioning and startup can be executed with efficiency.

And often this period of thinking and planning is required years in advance of actual on-site testing. When designs are being completed years in advance of on-site commissioning to allow construction activities to be properly planned and coordinated with precision, this is the time to start digging into the details and planning the precise transition between construction and commissioning for a snag-free finish to your project.

Flyvbjerg is giving wise wisdom and advice by cautioning us against losing sight of the fact that planning is the most cost-effective progress we can achieve. The opposite is actually the industry-norm though – project planners will impose that there is no money in the budget to engage key commissioning members early in the project. This approach to defer commissioning to the end adds significant cost to the project, when the cost of planning is actually the cheapest and best insurance to protect your project outcome.

PLANNING IS A CONCEPT WITH BAGGAGE

And to expand on the previous section on planning, Flyvbjerg makes the following statements:

Planning is pushing the vision to the point where it is sufficiently researched, analyzed, tested, and detailed so that we can be confident we have a reliable road map of the way forward.

Most planning is done with computers, paper, and physical models, meaning that planning is relatively cheap and safe. Barring other time pressures, it’s fine for planning to be slow. Delivery is another matter. Delivery is when serious money is spent and the project becomes vulnerable as a consequence.

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said that if he had five minutes to chop down a tree, he’d spend the first three sharpening the ax. That’s exactly the right approach for big projects: Put enormous care and effort into planning to ensure that delivery is smooth and swift.

Your project burn rate is the daily cost that the project incurs for each day’s activities. Let’s say you had a project with a budget of $100M that takes place over 200 days. Assuming evenly distributed costs, the daily burn rate is $500K per day. (In reality, the burn rate on projects is not linear and is backloaded as more costs accumulate at the end of projects). By the end of your project, each day of your project costs in excess of $500K, quite possibly in the millions of dollars per day towards the end.

This is what Flyvbjerg is referring to in his statements above. When your project commissioning is being planned earlier in your project, it is not costing $500K per day, it is costing much less than this, essentially free when you compare the magnitude of other costs on your project. But when you get to the execution of the commissioning and startup of your project at the end, each day of commissioning is extremely valuable, and you better make sure you have a superior plan for flawless execution of each day of testing if you want to avoid disaster.

Sharpen your axe in advance so that when it’s time to chop, you know you’re ready and can execute swiftly and efficiently to avoid any costly delays. Arrive at the job with a dull axe and the job will take much longer with much more costly due to your project burn rate.

Flyvbjerg identified some more baggage associated with planning:

What’s the worst that can happen during planning? Maybe your whiteboard is accidentally erased. What’s the worst that can happen during delivery? Your drill breaks through the ocean floor, flooding the tunnel. Just before you release your movie, a pandemic closes theaters. Your overpass collapses, killing dozens of people. And so much more. Almost any nightmare you can imagine can happen—and has happened—during delivery. You want to limit your exposure to this.

Take time to spot and correct problems. Do it on the drafting table, not the construction site. “If you slow things down sometimes and you take a second and a third look, you end up making less mistakes, and that means [the project gets done] faster.”

When projects leave commissioning to the end and figure it out on-the-fly, this is referred to as Cowboy Commissioning. And for the reasons above, when bad things happen during projects, this unnecessarily costs projects significant amounts of time and money.

One of the mottos from Keith Parrish, Commissioning Manager for the James Webb Space Telescope, was to prepare the CAST – Commissioning Activity Sequence & Timeline, have a well-trained and dedicated team, and then prepare for a bad day. Planning is your best and cheapest insurance to protect your project from disaster during commissioning due to any unforeseen circumstances.

THINK SLOW, ACT FAST: THAT’S THE SECRET OF SUCCESS

Commissioning is complex and requires detailed planning and coordination with all groups involved in projects, starting right at the beginning of projects. Commissioning needs to be integrated into all stages of projects, with detailed planning prior to on-site execution. Flyvbjerg refers to this as “Think slow, act fast”, and makes the following statements:

But “Think slow, act fast” is not how big projects are typically done. “Think fast, act slow” is. The track record of big projects unequivocally shows that. 

On project after project, rushed, superficial planning is followed by a quick start that makes everybody happy because shovels are in the ground. But inevitably, the project crashes into problems that were overlooked or not seriously analyzed and dealt with in planning.

The same holds true not only for the beginning of projects, but also for the end of projects during commissioning. A forced start to commissioning while systems are only half-completed installation makes everybody happy because progress “appears” to be happening. But inevitably, without exception, commissioning crashes into problems that have compounded from previous stages of projects. And the reality is, “the can is no longer able to be kicked down the road”. The issues must be dealt with now during commissioning in order for the project to at least achieve some of its original intended outcome. With a mountain of issues to deal with, the commissioning team is squeezed to do what they can and make some semblance of the project.

This contradicts Flyvbjerg’s statements though and cannot be the approach to projects.

A better approach is to do the planning and come up with a better plan. Leaving issues to the end of the project is not wise risk management and always results in delays and cost overruns.

Flyvbjerg’s database of 16,000 projects shows us that the current approach to projects is not working. While the industry-norm is to defer commissioning and only start to think about it towards the end of projects, this is significantly hindering the ability for projects to be completed on-time and on-budget. 

It’s time for a new approach to commissioning to improve the success rate of the next 16,000 projects.

PROJECTS DON’T GO WRONG, THEY START WRONG 

Flyvbjerb makes the following statement in relation to starting a project:

People say that projects “go wrong,” which they all too often do. But phrasing it that way is misleading; projects don’t go wrong so much as they start wrong.

The same can be said for starting on-site commissioning. If there has been no work in advance to follow a structured commissioning process and properly plan for commissioning through all stages of the project, then commissioning is starting wrong too.

THE GOAL IS IN THE BOX ON THE RIGHT

This is one of the best statements from Flyvbjerg’s book in relation to commissioning:

The goal is the box on the right. That’s where project planning must begin

Once the box on the right is clearly defined with no ambiguity, then the next logical step when planning projects is to determine the box to the immediate left. The box to the immediate left is commissioning and startup. The series of boxes between construction and the final box on the right (which are the commissioning and startup activities) and how well these activities take place determines if you will meet the goal of the box on the right.

Once that is settled, you can shift to considering what should go into the boxes on the left—the means that will best get you to your goal.

Here again Flyvberj is telling us to work right to left. Once the final box on the right is determined, the next is to determine the commissioning and startup activities required to achieve this box. The process continues to left, by then determining the construction activities to achieve successful commissioning, and design activities required to achieve successful construction and commissioning. Working from right to left is the only way to ensure that preceding activities support the end-goal of the project.

However, this is not what is typically done in industry – the industry-norm is to work from left to right – design drives construction, construction drives commissioning, and then who knows what you get at the end of the project.

Working right from left ensures that commissioning and startup aligns with the project end-goal, that construction activities are aligned and meet the needs of commissioning, and that design activities are aligned and meet the needs of construction and commissioning. Sticking with the industry-norm of left to right severely hinders your project’s ability to successfully achieve the end-goal.

Another statement from Flyvbjerg about working right to left:

Developing a clear, informed understanding of what the goal is and why—and never losing sight of it from beginning to end—is the foundation of a successful project.

Saying another way, a clear view of commissioning at the beginning of your project is the foundation of a successful project.

LOSING SIGHT OF THE RIGHT

To reiterate this point even further, Flyvbjerg makes these statements:

The most common way in which thinking from right to left fails is losing sight of the right, the goal.

Thinking from right to left is demanding because it’s not natural. What’s natural is WYSIATI—What You See Is All There Is—and focusing exclusively on what is in front of you. And when you are obsessed with a cool idea or you are deep into designing the project or buried in a thousand and one details, the box on the right is nowhere to be seen. That’s when trouble starts.

This is all too common, the project team is deep in design and deep in construction, but the goal on the right (successful commissioning and startup to achieve the project ISD) is nowhere to be seen. Flyvbjerg’s comment hits the nail on the head.

By integrating commissioning into earlier stages of projects, this keeps the focus on the box on the right and the activities required to successfully achieve the box on the right. The 4 pillars of integrated commissioning ensure that commissioning is never deferred to the end of your project and keep your project team from deviating away from the end goal.

EXPERIENCE MATTERS

Flyvbjerg defines phronesis as practical wisdom that allows us to see what is good for people and what is good for projects. This follows the best-for-project mentality that we teach in Commissioning Academy. Having people on projects with this practical wisdom and experience on past projects is essential. There are too many ways for projects to fail, and someone with the foresight to identify potential pitfalls will save your project from disaster.

Flyvbjerg adds:

In short, if you have phronesis, you’ve got it all. Therefore, a project leader with abundant phronesis is the single greatest asset a project can have. If you have a project, hire a leader like that.

Hire experienced people. Rely on the reliable. Don’t gamble if you can avoid it.

A strong plan greatly increases the probability of a swift and successful delivery. But it’s not enough. As any experienced project manager will tell you, you also need a capable, determined delivery team. The success of any project depends on getting the team right—“getting the right people on the bus,” as one colleague metaphorically put it, “and placing them in the right seats,” as another added.

The value of experienced teams cannot be overstated, yet it is routinely disregarded.

The challenge is, people with this level of experience are hard to find. And if you can find them, they are already busy on projects. You’re never going to find someone with this level of experience that is sitting around looking for something to do – they are in demand.

Flycbjerg’s comments on this:

So how do you get the team right? The simple solution, whenever possible, is to hire the equivalent of Frank Gehry and his team. If they exist, get them. Even if they are expensive—which they are not if you consider how much they will save you in cost, time, and reputational damage. And don’t wait until things have gone wrong; hire them up front. Fortunately, sometimes such teams don’t exist. Or if they do, they’re already engaged elsewhere. When a team cannot be hired, it must be created.

With the number of our wise and experienced commissioning experts retiring these days, you must have a succession plan to bring more junior team members to site so they can learn from these wise experts. The discrepancy between someone with 40 years of commissioning experience and someone new to commissioning is massive – they’re not even speaking the same language. And some wise experts don’t have patience for this. We help bridge this gap by getting new team members up to speed about commissioning so they are able to join the commissioning discussion and learn valuable experience from our commissioning elders before this knowledge disappears when they retire.

Experience matters with commissioning, but we’re not going to get more experienced commissioning people without first giving them the training tools they need to be able to join the conversation. 

SO YOU THINK YOUR PROJECT IS UNIQUE?

Flyvbjerg is clear on this one:

Think again. Understanding that your project is “one of those” is key to getting your forecasts right and managing your risks.

This is all uniqueness bias talking. Don’t listen to it. Keep the process simple: Define the class broadly.

The industry-norm is to believe that your project is unique, and that a structured commissioning process does not apply – your project requires something different.  However, getting stuck with this uniqueness-bias hurts projects when people start making things up on their own.  By not following industry-best processes, you’re just guessing – you don’t know what you don’t know.  The lesson Flyvbjerg is telling us is that within classes of projects, the commissioning process is not unique.  Any project implementing an industrial plant process must follow the same structured and organized commissioning process to make sure nothing is missed and that the proper risk-mitigating activities are integrated into all stages of the project.

Following a structured and organized commissioning process gives you access to experience-based and proven methods to follow for commissioning, to be used as an anchor for planning and executing your project commissioning.

Flyvbjerg makes the following statement about how basing decisions on actuals rather than forecasts can greatly improve the outcomes of your projects:

These are experience-based, real-world outcomes, not estimates, so they’re not distorted by psychology and strategic misrepresentation. Use them to anchor your forecast, and you will create an estimate that is rooted in reality, undistorted by behavioral biases, making it a better estimate.

And to counter the industry-norm uniqueness-bias, Flyvbjerg adds:

Your project is special, but unless you are doing what has literally never been done before—building a time machine, engineering a black hole—it is not unique; it is part of a larger class of projects.

The big hurdle to black swan management is overcoming uniqueness bias. If you imagine that your project is so different from other projects that you have nothing to learn from them, you will overlook risks that you would catch and mitigate if you instead switched to the outside view.

What Flyvbjerg is referring to with the term “outside view” is not getting blinded by only looking within your project – taking an outside view to see what is around and what other projects have done.  This is how following a structured and organized approach to commissioning helps your project – by anchoring the process you follow on industry-best commissioning methods used by other projects. Overcoming this unique bias is essential to getting your project commissioning on the right path and using industry-proven methods to plan and execute commissioning. 

FINISHING IS THE ULTIMATE RISK MITIGATION

Here’s the ultimate statement from Flyvbjerg that sums up how critical commissioning is for projects:

We saw that delivery is when things can go horribly and expensively wrong. Exhaustive planning that enables swift delivery, narrowing the time window that black swans can crash through, is an effective means of mitigating this risk. Finishing is the ultimate form of black swan prevention; after a project is done, it can’t blow up, at least not as regards to delivery.

Finishing is the ultimate form of black swan prevention! What a great statement – the message here is you better make sure that you have a rock-solid plan for commissioning and startup, since completing this last stage of your project successfully to complete your project is your best form of risk management. Don’t underestimate this statement – this is powerful! When you fully grasp this concept and integrate commissioning into all stages of your project, you are significantly mitigating the risk of your project ending in disaster. When you are focusing on the commissioning of your project, you are making sure that you can swiftly and successfully complete your project and reduce the risk of any major catastrophes from destroying your chance of being successful.

And with regards to finishing your project, Flyvbjerg makes the following statement:

Interestingly, early delays are not seen as a big deal by most project leaders. They figure they have time to catch up, precisely because the delays happen early. That sounds reasonable. But it’s dead wrong. Early delays cause chain reactions throughout the delivery process.

When we hear people make this statement on projects, that early delays are not a problem since there is time to make up for the delay, it makes every Commissioning Engineer cringe. We’re watching the project from the end, seeing the bad decisions such as this being made, and it eats us up inside. For some reason, design and construction groups are allowed to erode schedules, but then commissioning groups are beaten into submission to try to make up for previous groups’ delays. Listen to the message Flyvbjerg is giving, that delays in earlier project phases cause a chain reaction – commissioning groups will do whatever is possible to meet deadlines, but you’ll miss your in-service date with this type of thinking. Time is of the essence during all stages of projects – dumping all the project issues onto commissioning is not risk mitigation, it’s a path to failure.

EFFICIENCY AND SUSTAINABILITY

We have some incredible challenges to address over the next several decades, and one of them is climate change. Projects play a significant role in the energy transition that is taking place, and we cannot afford to make a mess of this. Flyvbjerg makes this statement:

“Scale and speed”; those are the key words. To win the fight against climate change, we must build at a scale and speed that put to shame the long, sorry record of the giant projects of the past. We can no longer afford bloated budgets and deadlines that keep sliding into the future.

The projects industry needs to change, that is clear, Flyvbjerg’s data shows this. Not everyone working on projects wants things to change – they are quite content with the dysfunction that exists. When projects are overbudget, where do these additional payments go to? Take a look at who these groups are, and they are the ones that will resist change in the industry. They want the industry to remain as status quo.

But this can no longer be tolerated as “The way it’s always been”. The world is faced with incredible challenges, and the projects-world needs to step-up and do better as part of the solution to address these challenges, not be part of the problem. Flyvbjerg follows up with these statements:

In our present situation, wasted resources and wasted time are a threat to civilization.

There are always other costs—costs that never appear on any spreadsheet—when a project spirals out of control. The simplest are what economists call “opportunity costs”: the money unnecessarily burned by bad planning that could have been used to fund something else, including other projects. How many triumphs and wonders has bad planning stolen from us? 

If we’re serious about addressing the current and future challenges, then we need better projects. We need better commissioning. And we need better outcomes so that we can collectively as a society tackle these challenges together. 

KNOW THAT YOUR BIGGEST RISK IS YOU

A lot of the challenges we encounter on projects are known and understood. There are of course many unknown-unknown challenges that exist as black swam events, but it is the challenges that we are already aware of, the ones we already know how to address, that continue to plague projects and destroy the end-goal.

This is unacceptable, and this is what Flyvbhjerg has to say about this using the Great Chicago Fire Festival failure as an example:

It’s tempting to think that projects fail because the world throws surprises at us: price and scope changes, accidents, weather, new management—the list goes on. But this is shallow thinking. The Great Chicago Fire Festival failed not because Jim Lasko couldn’t predict the exact chain of circumstances that led to the malfunction of the ignition system; it failed because he took the inside view on his project and didn’t study how failure typically occurs for live events as a class. Why didn’t he? Because focusing on the particular case and ignoring the class is what human psychology inclines us to do. The greatest threat Lasko faced wasn’t out in the world; it was in his own head, in his behavioral biases. This is true for every one of us and every project. Which is why your biggest risk is you.

The biggest risk is the people that work on projects. Our biases and accepted industry-norms cause us to be stuck in the way it has always been done. And it’s what leads to project failures on a big scale.

But don’t let this cause you to be stuck. Here’s what Flyvbjerg says:

It’s often said that opportunity is as important as risk. That’s false. Risk can kill you or your project. No upside can compensate for that.

This is why we must have all available tools at our disposal for commissioning. This is why we must be integrating commissioning into all stages of projects. This is why we must be following a structured proven commissioning process so we can know what we don’t even know. There is too much personal risk and project risk to do otherwise.

The industry-norm is to defer commissioning to later, but this clearly isn’t working. Fixing this starts with you and changing industry-norms for better projects, better infrastructure, and better ability to tackle the challenges that exist in the world.

We can no longer tolerate under-performing projects. From Flyvbjerg:

At the outset, will the project have the people and funds, including contingencies, needed to succeed? If not, walk away. Does an action contribute to achieving the goal in the box on the right? If not, skip it.

We must take this hard-line approach to insist on better projects to break industry-norms. Our future depends on it.

INTEGRATED COMMISSIONING

When I first read Flyvbjerg’s book, it felt like he was speaking directly to me. Commissioning could be added to the title of his book and it would directly apply.

The messages in his book are exactly what we help our students understand in our Commissioning Academy program. To improve projects, we need improved planning and execution processes for commissioning. The construction and commissioning industry has been indoctrinated with some harmful practices that hurt our ability to successfully complete projects. We need a better way if we are going to collectively solve the challenges we are faced with in the world.

You can be part of the solution by implementing better commissioning processes on your projects. I show you how to implement the Integrated Commissioning Method in our FREE 3-Day Mini-Course. Don’t miss this chance to improve your projects – be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Click below, and I’ll see you in the mini-course!