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.

What’s happening right now is that project teams have their own way to plan and execute commissioning – and none of these methods are actually completing projects on-time and on-budget. And to be honest with you, this is confusing – when over 90% of projects are late and over-budget, why do we continue to do what other projects have done, because this clearly is not working to successfully complete projects?

The problem is, when project teams are doing this, what they are doing is looking at what has been done in the past and they repeat what they’ve seen or done. Maybe they speak from experience, but what most people will do is complete a task and they’ll get a result, and they don’t understand why they got that result. They don’t understand the deeper project layers as to why their project was successful or why it was late and over-budget.

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.

So when you hear from other project teams, they’re just telling you what they did, and whether it was successful or not. But projects are complex, and there are a lot of other things going on.

When you hear what people did and then these things are repeated, it actually starts to create a narrative within the industry. Some of the narratives inside of the construction and commissioning industry are things like:

• Commissioning only takes place after construction is complete
• Your construction activities will determine when and how commissioning takes place
• The only way to learn commissioning is by following someone around site for 10 years
• 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 things 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. Governments and organizations are demanding this more and more – while in the past it was assumed that all projects will be late and over-budget, and that projects can go back for approval to get more time and money, this is no longer being tolerated, and better processes are being demanded to hold project teams accountable to their original cost and schedule estimates. 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 in our Commissioning Academy Program.

And you can get started to fix your project completion processes and see what is required to avoid Cowboy Commissioning. Get started with our On-Demand Mini-Course to save your project from Cowboy Commissioning and be able to complete your projects on-time and on-budget.

 I’ll see you in the Mini-Course!