Planning the last ten percent of a project
The monthly report says 94% complete, and the schedule has one bar left: "Commissioning and closeout — 15 days". The fire alarm verification cannot start until the sprinkler monitoring line is live. The elevator inspector is booking three weeks out, and the owner's furniture is due in ten days.
The end of a job is controlled less by production than by chains of tests, inspections and approvals, many run by people outside your company and each waiting for something else. A single closeout bar hides those chains, so the real critical path stays invisible until a date is missed. Commissioning alone is not a last-week task: the commissioning policy of Public Services and Procurement Canada describes it as a program of activities that runs from a project's inception to its completion, to confirm that systems are correctly installed and operate as intended.
- Start while the finishing work still has float, well before the last month.
- Break the closeout bar into chains, system by system: installed, started up, tested, commissioned, inspected by the authority, owner trained, turned over. Take the list from the commissioning and closeout sections of the specifications and from your closeout list.
- Ask every third party for its lead time and prerequisites — building and fire inspectors, the elevator inspector, the utility, the commissioning agent — and enter each as an activity with logic.
- Plan deficiency rounds by area: walk, fix, re-inspect and accept, each with a duration and a named foreman. See deficiency lists that close.
- Sequence turnover to the owner's move-in, and put the owner's own work — furniture, IT, security — in the schedule as activities.
- Give each chain one owner and review the finishing plan weekly, with the attention the structure got.
Common mistakes
- Leaving commissioning on the commissioning agent's calendar instead of in your schedule.
- Booking inspections when the work is finished instead of when the lead time requires.
- Leaving the owner's own activities out of the schedule.
Action list
This week
- Split the closeout bar by system and area
- Call each inspector and agency for lead times
- Enter deficiency rounds with durations and names
- Add the owner's move-in activities
- Find the new critical path to completion
- Confirm how your contract defines completion
Check your understanding
Why does a single closeout bar make the end of a job look safer than it is?
