What is the best way to learn about commissioning?  Should you take training to understand the commissioning process?  Or is training a waste of time, and the only way to learn about commissioning is through real on-site experience?

I receive very strong reactions to this question.  People with years of commissioning experience react negatively to the thought that their decades of hard work and experience can be summarized and taught in a course.  On the other hand, I receive questions from people that are new to commissioning saying that they don’t know where to start and feel that they will never become a commissioning expert if the only way is through decades of on-site experience.

There is a way to embrace both sides of the discussion and bridge the gap between the trusted and experienced commissioning experts and people that are new to commissioning.  Let’s discuss both training and experience to answer this very divided question.

The Commissioning Process

The commissioning process is complex.  It is more than just understanding how to do a loop check and what steps need to be taken during startup.  The commissioning process exists within every stage of the project and must be approached using the Integrated Commissioning Method to properly plan for commissioning during the early stages of the project.  Correct decisions must be made well in advance of on-site commissioning to ensure everything goes smoothly.

Every project is unique and the specific challenges that exist within each project need to be specifically addressed.  A best-for-project mindset needs to be established to determine how to specifically address each unique challenge rather than completing tasks in the same manner because “it has always been done that way”.

While each project is unique, the commissioning process is the same on every project.  The same risk-based commissioning process can be applied to the unique challenges of each project.  Regardless if the project is an oil and gas system or a power system, the same risk-based Integrated Commissioning Method needs to be applied to ensure the project is successful.

The problem is though that there is no standard commissioning process that is widely accepted in the industry – there are a million different ways to complete a project – everyone does it differently.  While there are standard phases of the commissioning process such as pre-commissioning, commissioning, startup, and performance testing, what takes place in each of these phases and who completes each task varies from project to project.  Even the terminology is different on each project.  You may hear the term boundary isolations on one project and demarcation point on another project.  This can be confusing, until you figure out that the terms mean the same thing.  Things get even more complex when advanced automation systems are included in projects and everything truly needs to work together as one system.  The details matter, and getting every little detail to come together at the right time for a functioning system can seem like an insurmountable task.

Commissioning Career

So where do you go to get the best commissioning knowledge?

If you are new to commissioning, do you try to secure a position on the commissioning team to learn from the trusted commissioning experts with decades of experience?  And how do you secure your first position when you are new to commissioning and do not know the commissioning process yet?

If you have a few years of commissioning experience, how do you ensure from project to project that everyone has the same understanding of the commissioning process?  How can the complexity of commissioning be simplified by having everyone using the same terminology and following the same risk-based approach to commissioning?  It can take half the project or more to get everyone aligned on how to complete the commissioning activities on your project.  On the next project, the same thing happens again, where the next group wants to approach commissioning differently, and you need to re-learn all the new terminology being used to understand the same concepts.  It can take many months or years to get each project team aligned on each commissioning project.

Commissioning Experience

I want to highlight the importance of commissioning experience before discussing training.  Commissioning experience is essential to the commissioning process – commissioning cannot proceed safely without someone involved that has done it before and knows what to look for.  The trusted commissioning experts with decades of commissioning experience are the golden leaders that are essential to commissioning success. These are the leaders that the commissioning team relies on to guide the team to completion.  These experienced experts are often referred to as “godfathers” in their area of expertise.  They have seen many similar systems commissioned and started up in the past and know what to proactively look for.  These experts are the ones to guide more junior members of the team and pass on their knowledge.  Every commissioning team needs at least one industry expert to impart their commissioning knowledge on others and ensure commissioning goes smoothly.

I have worked with a few of these commissioning godfathers in my career.  In each country there is likely only a handful of these experts for each specific industry.  There is one particular HVDC expert I recall that was the go-to expert in Canada and recognized on the world stage for his HVDC commissioning expertise.  Another wastewater treatment plant expert I recall was the go-to expert in Canada and involved in most projects in the country related to water treatment.  These are the industry leading experts that we need to have as part of our commissioning teams to pass their knowledge and wisdom to the project and to each individual team member.  Recognize these experts early in your career and learn everything that you can from them.  They will eventually retire (well not always, some love their job so much and work forever, or try to retire but are continually requested to help with the next project) and a new round of experts will take their place.  Learn from them, and you can become the next commissioning expert.

Commissioning Training

There are two big benefits to commissioning training:

1. Training will accelerate your commissioning career and get you to becoming a contributing member of the commissioning team much quicker.
2. Training helps to align the commissioning industry, so that everyone understands the same commissioning process and the proper risk mitigation steps can be taken to ensure commissioning success.  With better industry alignment, each project does not need to determine the steps for commissioning – the process is understood by all and the work can proceed.  A good comparison is driving – everyone understands the rules of the road.  If there were no rules, traffic would be complete chaos.  But because of the rules of the road, you can eventually get to your destination.  Learning the commissioning process gives you the rules of the road to then map your path to success for each specific commissioning project.

You definitely want to find the commissioning godfathers in your industry.  Seek them out and work with them on-site to learn as much as you can from them.  Before you find them though, you need to understand the fundamentals of commissioning to know what you are talking about.  This is where training comes in.  Training gives you the background knowledge to understand the terminology to be able to have a discussion with industry experts.  Training allows you to understand the commissioning process before getting to site to participate in commissioning.  How can you get started at site if you don’t know what the next step is?  You can certainly ask lots of questions, but you at least want to ask intelligent questions to get the most out of the experts on-site.  If you are starting with questions like “what is pre-commissioning”, you may not get much support from the experts.  But if instead you are asking questions like “which dynamic test scenarios should we focus on during IFAT to mitigate risks during SIT”, you will get a much more engaged discussion.

You can join the commissioning team and learn the basics of the commissioning process over a few years while working on the project.  This is the slow way to gain a basic understanding of the commissioning process.  Instead, a training course at the beginning of the project before you go to site accelerates your learning curve, giving you a solid understanding of the commissioning process and allowing you to take advantage of so many more on-site learning opportunities that you would have missed while trying to figure out the basics.  Training can significantly accelerate your commissioning career and get you to where you want to go much quicker.  Think about it, it has taken me 20 years to perfect my knowledge of the Integrated Commissioning Method.  You can take this same 20-year journey through your commissioning career.  Or you can take advantage of the knowledge I have gained in this time to significantly accelerate your learning and get to where you want to be in less time.

The other aspect of training is to understand the industry best methods for commissioning.  There are a million different ways to perform commissioning, but what is the industry best approach to mitigate risk and deliver a successful project.  It has taken me 20 years working on many different projects to see what works and what does not work for commissioning.  It is painful to watch projects struggle knowing that there is a better way, something you saw on a previous project that made commissioning so much easier.  If only everyone understood how to properly plan and execute commissioning.  The end of the project is too late to learn the lessons of how commissioning should have been done properly – by then the project is already over-budget and behind-schedule.  But if the Integrated Commissioning Method was understood before the project started, it would have been in much better shape to be completed successfully with the commissioning phase going smoothly.

Having this fundamental knowledge of what commissioning needs to accomplish and the industry-proven process to use to mitigate risk and develop an achievable and realistic commissioning sequence is critical before getting to site and figuring it out as you go.  The same training should be mandatory for everyone that wants to join the commissioning team.  With some upfront knowledge, everyone knows how to approach the tasks and is aligned with everyone else on the team.  This can save months or years of meetings to debate how to execute commissioning.  With everyone understanding the same process, everyone knows the next step of the process and how each step aligns with the next, to see the bigger picture and know the importance of their role.

On another note, training is beneficial for people that are not part of the commissioning team as well.  While you may not be able to get your senior PM or project sponsors to take a commissioning course, you can explain to them in a presentation what you have learned and how the process can benefit the project.  As more people understand the commissioning process early in their career, they will carry this knowledge with them as they transition to senior leadership positions.  When more people understand the commissioning process, the discussion with upper management can become much easier.  When upper management understands the commissioning process and the benefits that it offers, it becomes much easier to justify activities on the project and perform the proper planning early in the project for commissioning success.  It should be mandatory – if you want to join the commissioning team, you need to take a commissioning course.  And if you want to lead projects at the senior or executive level, you must have taken commissioning training during your path up the corporate ladder.

Check out the training that we offer to learn the commissioning process and position yourself for the best chance of success in your commissioning career.

Conclusion

Only after having a fundamental understanding of the commissioning process does the learning continue on-site.  Nothing beats hands-on experience of seeing the issues in the field and applying the things you have learned to better refine your understanding.  But you need to understand the fundamental commissioning process before getting neck-deep into the issues on-site.  Your on-site experience will be so much more engaging with industry leading experts if you know the details of what to ask them.  So, take a commissioning training course to accelerate your career and get the most out of your on-site learning opportunities. See the online commissioning programs that we offer. And who knows, after taking a course and learning on-site, you too can become the trusted commissioning authority on-site with decades of commissioning knowledge that junior engineers will look up to for guidance and mentorship.