The only way to stop losing money on projects is by finishing them.

Finishing projects requires successful completion of commissioning and startup.

So how can you expect to stop losing money on projects when most people on your project team don’t actually know how to finish them during commissioning?

Starting a project is relatively easy, executing a project may seem to be going fine, but actually finishing a project is the hard part. It’s not anyone’s fault – projects are complex. But it is scary to think that projects are started with huge sums of money being spent without anyone understanding exactly what is required to finish them. And it’s no wonder 9 out of 10 projects are late and over-budget when very few people understand the complex commissioning phase at the end of projects. Crossing your fingers and hoping that the commissioning experts will arrive to make everything work is not a plan – this is just wishful thinking – hardly a good project delivery strategy – but is what most projects will do.

Projects struggle to make the connection between the start and the finish. And again, this isn’t anyone’s fault. When contracts are being prepared and awarded, the commissioning guys are typically not around – they’re actively commissioning other projects. There are two fundamental details that are usually missing from contracts, that are easily defined upfront, but are missing because people are focused on starting the project, not finishing it. Because of this, contracts don’t define the critical details of how projects will be finished. Without these details included upfront to define the rules of the game, projects quickly end up going off-track. Projects can span many years, and it’s difficult to make the connection from the beginning activities to the end activities. These activities require different skillsets, but really the same technical expertise must be involved from beginning to end, to proactively make sure that projects can be finished.

When contracts are missing critical details for how the project will be finished, all the commissioning guys can do at the end of the project is point out mistakes that were made years in advance. This puts the project in cleanup mode, rather than proactive planning to ensure projects are completed on-time.

The way to stop losing money on projects is by getting your contracts right, and then leveraging the best CSU processes and CMS Software to keep track of everything. Complete transparency on the project of what needs to be done to finish it is required (that everyone can see, not just the commissioning team), so that everyone knows what is required to achieve the project end-goal, very early in the project, to ensure everyone from all stages of the project is marching towards the same destination.

You need a rock-solid plan to finish your project before you even start – before you even sign contracts. If your plan is to figure out how to finish your project later, then your project will be just another statistic, part of the 9 out of 10 projects that are late and over-budget.

I show you how to set your project up for success in this brief overview:

Mini-Course – Better Project Completions