Owner Signal: Substantial Completion is the Finish Line, and the Finish Line is Fake

I'm recalling a project from my early days as a controls contractor. We were turning over a hospital wing, months beyond the planned completion date (every trade misses their deadlines, and controls is the scapegoat since our work comes last).

My team couldn't get a pressure-independent control valve for a pharmacy to meet the required airflow within the required startup time. Late nights piled up as we adjusted settings. The commissioning agent was supposed to be off the job months ago.

We finally got it working after changing who-knows-how-many settings in the AHU and terminal unit. The commissioning agent gave the thumbs-up remotely, watching numbers on a graphic. Hospital staff were already moving in.

Our last job was delivering as-builts. Nobody had time or budget to review the changes we'd made, so the PDFs went to the GC with little to no detail on the escapade of configuration changes at the end. The GC passed them to the owner. All boxes checked. Everyone moved on.

I'm sure a hospital technician serviced that valve within a couple of years. If he even found our as-builts, they were useless, and surely he cursed us under his breath as he started troubleshooting from scratch.

Not my proudest moment, but not a unique one either. One GC put it to me this way:

Construction busts its ass for the first 90% of the job, then dumps the turnover over the fence and walks.

That rushed closeout is one of the biggest obstacles to Connected Buildings that actually serve occupants and operators. It's also one of the reasons we felt compelled to add a Construction Track to NexusCon this year. Below, we talk about why it's so broken and what mature owners and construction teams (several of them on stage at NexusCon) are doing about it.

The botched controls turnover I described above was just one line in a list of checkboxes the construction and design team had to deliver at turnover. Multiply that by electrical schematics, lighting, access control, CCTV, occupancy sensors, touch screens, and if each trade wasn't meticulous, the operator is left with a pile of PDF garbage.

For any as-built drawings that survive turnover with some value, that value is likely to be lost rapidly. Even the as-builts that arrive accurate don't stay accurate for long. One energy manager at a Mag 7 tech company told me that as her operators adjust the building for energy savings, the building morphs and no one updates the record. Walk the site, and it's nothing like the drawings.

That morphing is usually a good thing: undocumented improvement. Until a project undoes it. A healthcare operator told us that they performed an upgrade, and the control logic was copied and pasted back to its "original design intent". What was lost was 2 years of detailed tuning that his energy managers had put into optimizing each program.

Things get even messier as retrofits begin. One higher-ed commissioning director told us he's seen project teams treat a 15-year-old spec for a VAV box rated at 600 CFM as gospel about what a space can do, even though six months of trend data show the box has never produced more than 400 CFM.

Fortunately, mature building owners and construction teams are finding ways to design, construct, hand over, and document a building's connected systems in a way that enhances the operator experience rather than adding another headache. Here are three specific ways people are attacking this problem and sharing their progress at NexusCon:

🦊Approach #1 - Assign ownership before bid

So many of the pitfalls above are because the work "slips between the cracks". It takes dozens (or hundreds) of specialists to build Connected Buildings, and the gray areas are infinite.

Our Intent, Intact educational session at NexusCon features professionals who have developed methods to ensure that the intent established during design supports occupants and operators and remains intact throughout design, specification, and construction. Two presentations from that session:

Aptitude will share the RACI they build for every integration point in a project: who supplies, who programs, who connects each system, written into the spec before bid, so every integration has a named owner instead of an assumption.

Bedrock will share the standard they've enforced across the design of roughly 70 integrated buildings in Detroit and Cleveland, buildings so identical in how they're integrated that their teams operate them as if they are a single campus.

🦊Approach #2 - Turnover as living data, not PDFs

If you're a data layer nerd, the words "as-builts" and "PDFs" probably triggered you above, because static data will always be out of date. In our Mastering Closeout session, we focus on how project delivery teams are proving the building works and handing over a record ops can run on. Two examples:

We'll hear from Barton Malow, who is collecting turnover data during construction and delivering it through KODE OS, so operations start with a living record rather than a flash drive.

Aptitude will show the asset registry they built in Autodesk Tandem, where scanning a QR code on a VAV reveals which air handler feeds it, which breaker powers it, and every submittal attached to it.

🦊Approach #3 - Acceptance and beyond is gated on evidence

Also within Mastering Closeout, we'll hear from Yale and Altura, who developed quantitative acceptance criteria for their MEP systems, and then used those criteria to redefine what substantial completion means in their contracts with GCs and trades. And because occupants and seasons guarantee issues no matter how clean the turnover, we'll hear how owners are rewriting warranty and commissioning language to give the building a full first year to reach design intent.

The construction-to-operations turnover is broken. We'll have all the people in the room who are determined to fix it. Will you be joining us?

‍

Register for NexusCon.

Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week: