Last month’s column (February 2015) addressed the potential situation where the design engineers specify a change to a system which has already passed its commissioning functional performance test. Although inconvenient and somewhat costly so late in the project, that situation is handled through normal project change processes, retesting, and updated documentation.
This month, however, I am going to address another potential testing phase challenge. This time the commissioning professional discovers, during functional performance testing, that the systems are programmed and controlled differently than originally designed and different from the approved control system submittals. There are two flavors of this situation.