From Rockets to Skyscrapers: Revolutionizing Commissioning with Paul Turner – Episode 2 | Construction Technology

01:38
Paul Turner
Thanks, Erin. Thanks for that introduction. Happy to be here.

01:41
Erin Khan
Yeah, so tell us a little bit more about yourself, Paul.

01:47
Paul Turner
So that’s a pretty good explanation of some of my career history, really. When I was working in the aerospace industry, it’s obviously a high standard industry because everything has to work right. When you launch a satellite into space, there is no reset switch. It has to work. So testing and high quality is very important. We test extensively on the ground before it goes into space. When I transitioned to the power industry, I just didn’t see that same level of quality. I think it’s too easy. People just default to know that you can walk over to the production cubicle and you can just hit the reset button. It’s just too easy. So it can become a bit, I don’t know, a bit more laid back towards some of those higher quality standards. But it really was impacting the projects I was working on and the ability to finish on time and on budget with high quality systems. We just weren’t achieving success like I was used to in the aerospace industry. So that really opened my eyes to some of the challenges with completing these large megaprojects and the complexity that’s involved in completing these high dollar, high stakes tasks, that there needed to be a more concerted effort to increase quality and make commissioning successful at the end of projects. So that’s what’s prompted me to generate and produce the commissioning academy, to help people understand this complex topic of commissioning so that we can hopefully complete our projects more successfully on time and on budget.

03:32
Nandan Thakar
Hey, Paul, it’s Nandan here. Great to have you. With a background like yours and the start you had in the aerospace industry, you could be working for SpaceX right now, but you chose commissioning. So I’m very curious why commissioning? What I would feel is an underappreciated practice in mega projects and vendors who are used to basic checklist, every subcontractors to its own tools, they do the basic checklist and then flick it across the line. So there doesn’t seem to be like a coherent way of quality and commissioning management. So, yeah, I’m very curious, with your background, why commissioning? And, yeah, just tell us more about that.

04:24
Paul Turner
It’s all too common of a story, isn’t it? It’s a challenge on a lot of projects. I guess the earliest memory I have of when I was little was probably when I was five years old. I just always liked to build things. If I was building a little project in the garage or I working with my dad on his construction projects, I just always liked to build things. What drove me into an engineering career and working on some of these complex projects, the most exciting part of projects is, of course, seeing everything work in the end. Everybody’s years of efforts and dollars spent to see everything come together at the end was always the most exciting part for me. That’s what led me towards commissioning is because that’s the exciting part of the project. That’s when we get to see everything moving and turning and electricity flowing. And it just fascinated me and I wanted to do even better to see these projects succeed. So that’s what’s kind of led me in my engineering career towards commissioning, is just seeing all that hard work come to fruition at the end of projects.

05:31
Nandan Thakar
Excellent.

05:31
Erin Khan
Yeah, yeah, I can relate to that, Paul. I think what I get excited about too is you see the tangible building or whatever it is that you’ve contributed to come to life right before your eyes. That building piece is super exciting. So, yeah, glad we have you here in construction and, yeah, let’s dive into more of the commissioning space. For me. My background’s in construction and as a project engineer, we had a commissioning manager on our jobs, but I didn’t really have too much to do with them. They just seemed to be somebody who went around and did stuff with a lot of lists. But I’m sure there’s far, far more to the role. Could you tell me more about what commissioning managers do for projects?

06:22
Paul Turner
Absolutely. Yep. When you think of these large undertakings, these large projects, they kind of start at a single point. If there’s project approval or contract award, and then things branch out from there. Multiple things are happening at the same time through design, and then even more activities as we get into construction. There could be tens, hundreds, thousands of parallel activities going on, all at the same time. As the project spreads out. There’s a process at the end of the project to bring all of that back to one single point, which is your project and service date. So all of those multiple activities that are taking place at the same time, they’ve all got to come back together as one functional plant process at the end of the project. And that’s essentially what commissioning is. There’s a million moving pieces on these large projects, and it takes a quite a bit of effort and coordination and communication and discussions with everybody on the project to make sure that everything comes back together as it needs to. So these large plan processes can generate their intended function. So there’s definitely a lot of planning required to make sure that happens. That’s why commissioning managers need to get involved early in the project to start planning and discussing and coordinating with all these groups all the technical details that are required, so that everything comes back together in one plan process. And this 20, 30, 40 years ago, used to be a very brute force manual process to go through and collect all these details and make everything work together. Thankfully, there’s been a lot of tools that have come along that help us manage all this information and manage all the details so that we can successfully bring these projects back together at the end. So it definitely requires a specialized skill set, lots of communication, lots of coordination to make sure everything works, because during commissioning, that’s really when the details start to matter. Right? All the big details, all the small details. Every little detail makes a difference during commissioning. If you’ve got a large oil filled transformer, sure, that’s a big detail, but even just a small little VFD setting, that’s not correct in a motor controller, that can be a big deal during commissioning if your equipment’s tripping off. So there’s a million things to manage and it’s all going to come together successfully at the end of the project and that’s the commissioning manager’s job, is to pull that all together.

08:59
Erin Khan
So, quick question. You mentioned getting involved early on in the project. Just how early do you recommend?

09:06
Paul Turner
As early as possible. It can never be too early.

09:09
Erin Khan
Oh, really?

09:10
Paul Turner
A lot of times you’ll hear, like, even during the feed process, when some of the front end engineering and design is being conducted. Oh, wow. Definitely at that point. Certainly when contracts are being developed. When you look at a lot of contracts on projects that pretty light on commissioning details, right, it’s understandable because everybody’s focused on getting the project started. They want to get the contract awarded, you want to mobilize to site, you want to start the work. Right? That’s everybody’s focus. Two or three or four years before the end of the project and the commissioning details get missed. But that’s when you got to get your commissioning manager, your key commissioning people involved to make sure that these aspects are included in contracts, so that we’re not only using contracts to get the work started, but we can also use them as a tool to finish the job during commissioning. So I always say it’s never too early to get commissioning involved in the project because it does take some upfront planning. So you can start with the end in mind and successfully.

10:12
Nandan Thakar
Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s quite cool. And, you know, projects come in various different shapes and forms. You have your high voltage project and you’ve been involved with a number of those, hydroelectric etcetera, but then you also have complex builds, you know, your airports and tunnels and bridges and what have you, and they all have dozens of practices and subcontractors that contribute to that process. So what I would love to explore with you is, is there a best practice methodology that can map to most industries building sort of medium to complex projects? So is there a structure to how any project can look at commissioning from the onset so that it is set up for good governance and good hand over at the end? So, yeah, if you can let us know what the best practice framework would be.

11:14
Paul Turner
That right, for sure, yeah. When I look at a lot of projects, they tend to end up kind of misaligned right from the beginning. There’s. There’s a disconnect between how projects are started and how they’re finished. A lot of times what we’re taught in project management is to prepare your WB’s and have all your work breakdown structure. Right. Which is great because that’s how a lot of the design folks are going to prepare some of the design packages. But that doesn’t necessarily align with how the project is going to be started up at the end of the project. So what’s key, and another reason for commissioning folks to get involved earlier in the project, is to make sure that there’s a systems based approach starting early in the project. When you structure the project right from the beginning with that systems based approach that aligns identically with your startup sequence, that helps you structure basically the backbone of your entire project so that everything is aligned to and it can come in in the right sequence to align with your startup sequence. When this doesn’t occur, then that’s when you see a misalignment between construction and commissioning, because design guys will be making their own plan, the construction guys will be making their own plan, and nothing’s going to align in that complex handover between construction and commissioning. That’s not to say that the construction folks, they need to optimize for their means and methods, for sure, but we need to make sure that there’s an alignment and the entire project is optimized through all phases. And that’s mainly done with a systems based approach that starts early in the project.

12:59
Nandan Thakar
And so are you suggesting having sort of design led, systems led approach to start with, communicating that to all the groups involved, practices as well as subcontractors, and then bringing alignment early on so that good governance could carry it through. That’s great. The other aspect, which is where I’ve seen a lot of challenges, is around construction through, through handover. So it’ll be good to see some lessons learned and some experience that you would have in making sure that is optimized from the onset. Any learnings you have there from construction into completion and handover 30 years ago.

13:53
Paul Turner
It used to be that we’d have all this random documentation and you’d dump it on the poor summer student and they’d have to go through all this stuff and consolidate all these turnover binders. And they’re still called that turnover binders, but it was a nightmare. And everybody with experience is leaving the project and the poor summer student is left to try and sort through this out. And it never went well because they weren’t involved in the project. They don’t have that level of experience. It was never a good method to consolidate all of this important project information into usable condition that can be used through the lifetime of the new facilities. If you think the project is taking two, three, four years, well, the project is going to, the new facilities are going to be operated for 30, 40, 50 years. And they need this information that was generated from the project to be able to operate the new facilities reliably and efficiently. But when they’re just getting bits and pieces of stuff that’s turned over and missing and incomplete through this turnover process, it just never produced a good product for our folks operating these new facilities. And as projects have progressed over the last couple decades, few decades, there’s just an information overload that’s produced of documents and settings, and it’s too much information for any one person, let alone a team of people, to manage efficiently and organize in a proper way that can be used for the life of the asset. So thankfully, we have a lot of tools that can simplify this process significantly. When tools are engaged in projects early and they’re used properly, capturing the asset hierarchy of the facilities, then it’s a very simple process at the end to generate electronic, searchable files, which is what operating folks want to be able to easily find the information they need when things are going wrong in the plant and they need to fix something. So definitely leveraging the new tools that have been created even in the last five years and helping us with this information overload is essential to manage the crushing amount of information that’s generated on today’s projects.

16:15
Erin Khan
Yeah, so what I get from that, Paul, my takeaway is really think about the end user of the data, right? So somehow some facility manager is going to have to sift through all of this information overload at some point to be able to pinpoint a specific piece of data or something about a piece of equipment. That’s super important. And if we use the right tools, get it gathered early, all of these things that you’re mentioning, it essentially sets them up for success, right?

16:46
Paul Turner
Absolutely. I often like to refer to Stephen Covey’s book, seven habits of highly successful people. His habit number two is begin with the end in mind. Right. So this is the same philosophy process that we need to think of is on that single point in time, whatever our project and service date is, we’re going to transition from the project environment, the capital environment, to the operating environment. Right. We don’t want that to be a sudden, jarring experience where someone just has the keys and runs from site. I’ve unfortunately seen that happen. We want to support that soft handover transition from one group to the other, and bridge that gap so that the folks that are going to be inheriting these assets and operating them for 30, 40, 50 years have what they need, have the training they need, and they’re prepared and comfortable ready to upgrade these new facilities reliably.

17:41
Erin Khan
So what other challenges have you seen throughout your career, specifically with commissioning and these large projects?

17:50
Paul Turner
One of the big challenges is always communication. We’re working with large teams. They could be thousands of people on teams. And with the huge volumes of data and information that’s produced, it’s very challenging to get right information in the hands of the right people at the right time, especially if you’re out in the field looking for information. Often on projects, because they can span many years, some of the groups can unfortunately end up a bit siloed. Right. As the engineering groups do their thing, the construction groups do their thing, the commissioning guys do their thing. Right. And unfortunately, we can see one group kind of just throwing things over the wall at the other and we absolutely want to avoid that. Right. When we’re working on such huge initiatives, the only way they’re going to be done successfully is when we’re working as a team, helping each other succeed, to be able to accomplish their primary responsibilities the best that they can so that the entire project is successful. When there’s breakdowns in communication or a lack of information that’s available to people when they need it, that’s when we can see some of these silos developing. Some of the tools that have been developed significantly help convey some of the complexities of commissioning to all groups on the project, so that they can understand how their role fits into a successful finish of the project. What we don’t want is groups to be kind of splintered on their own and not understanding where their role fits in. And commissioning is a very complex topics, so it’s not reasonable to expect everyone to be an expert in commissioning. We need some of these communication tools that simplify the process, help people understand where some of these steps are going to fit in, so that everything comes together successfully in the end. And it’s definitely a challenge, but we’re using some tools to try and help us do that.

19:52
Erin Khan
Yeah. And what I’m thinking is, like, it’s not just the commissioning manager that’s, you know, running commissioning, we’re all a part of it. So it’s really a team sport.

20:04
Paul Turner
That’s right. And that’s the only way. The only way that projects are successful is when everybody’s contributing to the team successfully. Right. As soon as there’s a desire, misaligned incentives, then it’s not going to come together to the end. And it’s a huge challenge because we’re working with lots of people with lots of different backgrounds, and it is complex. So it’s a challenge for sure.

20:28
Nandan Thakar
Yeah, Paul, from just exploring that a little bit more. So team collaboration and communication seems to be like a key CoGn success of a commissioning program, and you called that out as a challenge. So besides, leveraging a tool is the answer lie in configuring the workflow of the tool. And what about the communication and the governance that happened through the process? So how to enhance team collaboration on the projects where you may have various different subcontractors, sometimes different sites as well? Because based on the complexity of the project, you may have different crews working slightly different geographically, couple of hundred meters apart. So how would you ensure, as a commissioning manager, that the teams and the subcontractors are ally for a great outcome?

21:39
Paul Turner
Everybody’s trying to do their best on projects, right? I’ve never seen anybody that’s maliciously trying to do something wrong on a project. Everybody has their best intentions and wants the project to succeed, but there’s always that bigger picture element of how this is all going to come together as one. And it’s usually just a misunderstanding or a lack of information that people don’t have to see the bigger picture on the some of these projects. Now, that bigger picture is how this is all going to fit together at the end during commissioning. And what I’ve found is that when you explain this to people, when you give them this bigger picture, when they can see how their role fits into the process, then they understand why something might need to be done by a certain date or how a particular deficiency may be impacting the ability to proceed with the work. So without everybody still needing to be that expert in commissioning, as long as you can paint the picture of what this looks like and how it’s going to come together, what that sequence of commissioning steps are, then that helps people understand that bigger picture and allow them to feed into the process to finish the project successfully. I’ve had some success with that, to kind of give people that information and show them the bigger picture on how this is going to work.

23:07
Erin Khan
Gotcha. What does that look like, showing them the bigger picture? If we can go a little bit deeper on that, I’m curious.

23:17
Paul Turner
So it’s largely about what the commissioning process is. So there’s several stages starting, like we talked about, even right at the beginning of projects, but when we were to get into off site testing, during factory acceptance testing or integrated factory acceptance testing, that’s kind of some of the first steps of physically testing the equipment, then how is this matched with what’s going to take place on site, during our site acceptance testing. So there’s a very detailed sequence to test all these items as maybe individual pieces of equipment and then as subsystems, groups of equipment that need to work together as we build up the bigger systems of the project and how this all comes together. So when you give people visibility into what this process looks like and each of the stages and what’s actually being done, I found that that helps give people the bigger picture of how this is all going to come together in the end. There’s still that complexity of what this all is during commissioning, and we can’t expect everybody to be an expert in commissioning, but at least if we can have a method to communicate what this process looks like, I found that to be quite helpful.

24:34
Erin Khan
Yeah. Yeah. So, like transparency or, you know, putting a little extra effort into painting the picture can help go the extra mile there. So I’m curious, Paul, and I love to ask this question, just in general, to a lot of the people in AEC that I connect with, but if you could wave a magic wand and poof, magic, you have the perfect tool, the ideal tool for commissioning management. What would that look like? And for companies that are looking for a great tool like that, what should they consider or have on their wish list for implementation?

25:16
Paul Turner
That perfect tool would look like the bridge from the end of the project to the beginning of the project. I guess, unfortunately, in the industry, there’s still a disconnect from the people that are working at the end of the project versus the people that are working at the beginning of the project. And it’s understandable because those could be three or four years apart from each other. Right, right. Different thought processes. But to have that begin with the end in mind tool that kind of brings that, I guess a good way to think of it is brings that feedback loop from the end of the project back to the beginning of the project. That would be the lessons learned component to, I guess, steer or guide the project right from the beginning to a successful finish. If we could bridge that gap with a tool, that would be, I guess, the magic wand that I would wave to see if we could do that. And I guess to add to that from a second point is to maybe somehow flip the narrative in the industry where I think commissioning is often unfortunately viewed as an expense, where it should be more viewed as a money saving opportunity, or I guess the right way to put it would be risk management. If the proper commissioning elements are being discussed at the beginning of the project, that’s your best method for risk management to make sure that your project ends successfully is by doing some of these upfront activities and putting in the upfront effort for commissioning is an excellent risk management method to make sure that your project finishes successfully.

27:05
Nandan Thakar
Yeah, and that’s well said, Paul. And I guess this is where I would like to highlight sort of almost genesis of SureWorx as a product kind of platform, where as a CIO in a tier one construction company, I saw those challenges that we have discussed this podcast and how the process was working in a pretty lean, sort of basic checklist based way. So we developed what would come close to an ideal tool. And I mean, you never get there, you always tend towards it. It’s one of those mathematical concepts. But yeah, just this ability to create templates of assets, then subsystems and systems, ability to reuse those templates and standardize that systems or design led approach. As you mentioned, ability to have this catalog at a global level that any project director or site manager can reuse and then still automate and iterate is key to bringing that consistency across projects. And then the other thing that was very demand driven by our customers was the visibility of where the checklists are. So we ended up solving that in a tree structure, a visual tree structure that will cascade all the systems down to such systems, down to the asset and its attributes. So when you visually see what tests you need to do on every floor or every area of a project that is very intuitive for humans, and then being able to sort of build asset registers on the go, where the register actually builds itself and you have percentage complete on all your checklists as you go, saves a lot of time. And then our goal, as you said, keep the end in mind, was a single cash handle, which is easier said than done. But I probably have managed that is very satisfying. Not only to save weeks worth of effort to collate all this information in the entity project, but to build that information on all the rich metadata, ways that everything is PDF, you might actually handing over visible data that is it searchable. So yeah, so it’s still work in progress. We’re getting a lot of feedback from I projects with thousands, tens of thousands of checklists using the platform. But yeah, I’ve had input from a lot of people myself. We are always improving and it is, as I said, a very underappreciated domain from my perspective. I would like to just check with you. Besides a tool, what are the other developments that are happening in the market that can improve quality and commissioning outcomes? So with this increasing adoption of AI or AI agents and any other techniques that you see out there. Where are we heading in terms of improving?

30:45
Paul Turner
The construction industry? Unfortunately, has been very slow to adapt over the last 2030 years, where a lot of industries have embraced technology and improved productivity. We haven’t really seen that in the construction industry. However, I think with AI, like you mentioned, I think we are going to see some changes in the next five to ten years, maybe willingly or unwillingly. There’s going to be a huge opportunity with all the data gathering, if we’re digitizing our information on projects, this information that we’re gathering is perfect for what some of the AI systems we’re seeing need to review and analyze. And if we have this information gathered and we can feed these to our AI systems, I can only imagine that even in the next six months, few years, that we’re going to see a lot of change and a lot of developments to leverage some of these tools to help us complete our construction projects. That some of the groups, a lot of the groups are certainly going to want to embrace to improve productivity. That may drag some of the people that don’t want to change into the future as they see how some of these tools do develop in the next few years.

32:07
Erin Khan
I have to know, oftentimes we joke, does it take a rocket scientist? In this case, yes. So tell us a little bit more about your time with the Canadian Space Agency. Being in aerospace, is there a memorable project or experience that kind of influenced your decision and your path towards commissioning? And what was the lesson learned?

32:34
Paul Turner
I worked on some pretty cool projects. They were amazing experiences. One of the first satellites I built was called SciSat. It was launched in 2003, and it was actually one of the primary satellites to help solve the problem with the hole in the ozone layer. What I was doing was measuring the particulates in the earth’s atmosphere every time or 15 times per day. It’s called an occultation, where it watches the sun’s rays through the earth’s atmosphere, and it can tell what particles are in the atmosphere. And through some of the data gathered by SciSat, that’s some of the fundamental knowledge that was used to solve the hole in the ozone layer. And I was a part of that building this. It’s called a spacecraft bus. So building the computer system that runs the satellite so that satellite is still in orbit. My initials may be on it somewhere, orbiting a space 15 times a day. I had another great experience working on another satellite called Cassiope, and it was launched in 2010, and it had a suite of eight science instruments to measure the magnetics of the north and south pole. And that was a great experience too, because we designed, from a blank sheet of paper the computer system to run this satellite in a space radiation environment, which is one of the most harshest design environments that you can design for. So that was a great experience out.

34:10
Erin Khan
Of this world, if I can make.

34:13
Paul Turner
The joke, that’s for sure. Yeah. Other great projects. Qualifying rocket programs for various groups, qualification programs to prove that these booster motors can withstand some harsh battle conditions. It was lots of fun working on payloads that are on the International Space Station with some of the astronauts using, and seeing them actually using the hardware that I built in the space station was pretty cool. So all of these things definitely required high levels of quality, and that’s kind of the mindset that I’ve taken to some of these other big projects, that quality is important and we need these things to function. In the end, I would say it’s a bigger challenge on our ground based projects because there’s just so many people involved and there’s so much money and they’re huge projects that it’s a huge undertaking to get the quality levels that are required and pull these projects together so that they function correctly in the end.

35:16
Erin Khan
So what’s more difficult or challenging in your perspective, sending or making a successful spacecraft or space mission? I’m not using the right terms for aerospace, I’m sure, or delivering these large, complex projects with tons of different stakeholders and. And all of that.

35:37
Paul Turner
They’ve all got unique challenges and different circumstances. Maybe the technology involved to launch a spacecraft is fairly advanced in cutting edge. A lot of the ground based systems are pretty basic PlC logic. So from a design perspective, satellites were definitely a little bit more complex when you launch something into orbit. The term commissioning, commissioning is actually done in space after the rocket launches, so.

36:10
Erin Khan
Oh, fascinating.

36:12
Paul Turner
Yeah.

36:12
Erin Khan
How does that happen?

36:15
Paul Turner
It’s all done remotely, so. And that’s why it has to work, because when you’re commissioning in space, you may have. The first satellite we launched had a six month period of commissioning where you’re turning the instruments on for the first time. You’re making sure the solar panels deploy if there’s deployables, and all of that is done on orbit and you’re looking at a screen to verify all this stuff. So it is actually very similar to looking at your HMI screen in your control room. It’s just that you can’t run down the hallway and go hit the reset switch on your cubicle if something goes wrong, you only have your HMI screen that you’re looking at when your satellite’s in orbit and you can’t make any hardware changes, you could maybe make some software updates, but the hardware has to be bulletproof, which is why we go through a pretty extensive test phase on the ground, to make sure that everything is going to go right after launch, in orbit, during commissioning.

37:10
Erin Khan
Right. So to put it into super simple terms, in my mind, big takeaway from working with things that go to space. There’s no room for an oops, really, so we can take that philosophy, apply it to our projects and then be able to better ensure that we have less oops, we have better guarantees on safety, budget, schedule, you name it. Thanks for sharing that, Paul, for sure, super fascinating and really, really cool to hear about some of the work with the ozone layer, all the other stuff that you mentioned. I’m sure there’s a ton more, so thanks for that.

37:57
Paul Turner
You’re welcome, Erin.

37:59
Nandan Thakar
I just have one connection there. I was talking to someone and I kept saying rocket science a couple of times and he’s like, you know, it’s not rocket science, it’s aeronautical engineering.

38:08
Erin Khan
Oh, okay. Oops.

38:11
Nandan Thakar
No, it’s just a space joke.

38:14
Erin Khan
Yeah, yeah, totally.

38:16
Nandan Thakar
Because the commoners call it rocket science. They were cognizant. Right, there we go. Yeah. Very, very good to hear that for someone looking at commissioning as a career. So this is more for people looking to enter the industry or they are at the early stage of their career and looking at commissioning as a potential career pathway. What would be your advice to them in terms of what they look out for and how they enhance their understanding and knowledge of the industry so that they can become proficient at being a commissioning manager.

39:03
Paul Turner
So there’s two key critical aspects that are required to become experienced with commissioning. The first one is knowledge and the second one is experience. They both go hand in hand. We’ve been trying to bridge that gap and help some people with the knowledge. That’s why I created the commissioning academy, is to get that knowledge in people’s hands at least a fundamental understanding of what the commissioning process is, so that when you go to sites and you’re learning by experience, you have that baseline fundamental understanding of what this commissioning process is supposed to look like. Experience is still super important too, right? The saying I often hear is, you can’t really teach a kid to ride a bike. They have to get on the bike, they have to ride it, they have to get the bumps and bruises and they have to figure it out. Right. That’s certainly a part of commissioning as well is you can only learn so much that you got to get out in the field too. You got to get the hands on experience. You got to learn from our wise commissioning experts. You got to soak up that knowledge so that you can see and feel the equipment that’s out there and see how a lot of this works, too. Those are the two key aspects that I would recommend for people to consider. I guess another one is communication is key. It’s important for all aspects of projects and we need to be good communicators. We need to be able to work with other people and understand their questions and concerns because that’s the only way projects are successful, is when we can work together as a team to pull off these huge and expensive endeavors.

40:39
Erin Khan
All right, that’s amazing, Paul and I love the education focus there, so that’s truly, truly a very impactful way of not just bringing the industry forward, but keeping it going and nurturing future talent for AEC. So love it. All right, so I want to revisit some of my key takeaways because this has been fantastic, fantastic session. I think what I’ve kind of summarized here is a few points of get involved early. Way earlier when you said even in the contract phase, I was like, oh, that’s even way, way earlier than what I initially thought. So great nugget there. And that we’re all a little bit a commissioning team member ourselves, right? So we all have a piece to put play with, a successful commissioning experience for the projects and seeing that bigger picture and how we fit in helps make that run smoothly. Commissioning is risk management, so I never really thought about it that way either. We all know that in construction we have issues with completion, on time, on budget, you name it. I think there are some pretty scary stats out there that say we’re not the best industry for hitting our marks, but if we think about, again, the commissioning piece playing a huge role in that, it’s definitely something that obviously get it involved way earlier, prioritize, get everybody understanding their role in the process and then that last piece. So what makes a good commissioning manager? Knowledge, experience, communication, which I think anybody can probably learn at some point or kind of grow into those skills and role. So if anybody’s listening out there and thinking about this for a career, it’s definitely an option. So thanks, Paul. Really appreciate it.

42:46
Paul Turner
You’re welcome.

42:47
Nandan Thakar
We have called out where people can reach out to Paul in terms of that knowledge part experience will happen along the way. So, yeah, feel free to reach out to all. I guess the only other thing I would call out, almost in a self serving way, is the role that tool plays in bringing all this together. The communication piece, the workflow, the governance, the visibility, the digital handover. So, yeah, it’s an enabler, the tool. It’s not to be all, end all, but it’s a significant enabler tool what should be a central process in risk management. And so, yeah, really enjoyed this one. Thank you for your time, Paul.

43:37
Paul Turner
Thank you.

43:39
Erin Khan
Thank you, Peter and Nandan, for joining me on this episode of the SureWorx podcast for our listeners. We’re excited to bring you to the leading edge of innovation and construction. The course of this show, we’ll be hosting leaders from the industry as they share their experience and insights. Finally, if you’re interested in being a guest on the SureWorx podcast, don’t be shy. Please send us an email at podcast@sureworx.io. That’s podcast IO to connect with us. Thanks again, and be sure to tune in for our next episode. I’m Erin Kahn, and this is the SureWorx podcast.