The Relation between Pre-planning, Commissioning and Enhanced Project Performance

Pre-planning of construction projects is important for the performance of cost, time, and quality. However, recent research finds that quality related to final testing, adjustment, and balancing of HVAC systems are often overlooked due to deadline pressure. Consequently, this results in poor energy performance and dissatisfied end-users. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between pre-planning, commissioning, and project performance. A publicly funded project with a compressed construction period was followed as a case study. During the case study, passive observation, semi-constructed interviews, and questionnaires were applied. This study showed that by implementing commissioning, project pre-planning and organizational support is increased. Moreover, the commissioning process creates awareness and fosters proactivity between the project participants, thus complications are discovered and handled earlier. By improved pre-planning and organizational support, and increasing proactivity, the project’s cost, time and quality performance is improved. This underlines the importance of prioritizing pre-planning. Moreover, increased energy and technical demands increase project complexity which makes project success even more dependent on the quality of the plans.