Last month, this column acknowledged the fact that some projects do not have written Owner’s Project Requirements (OPR) documents for the commissioning professional to reference. An OPR is intended to articulate the owner’s acceptance criteria for the systems to be commissioned. It is the performance for which the design team should size, configure, and control the new systems, and it is the performance against which the commissioning professional should test the systems.
Criteria included in an OPR can include anything the building owner values, but the following is a limited list of common parameters. To be meaningful, each of the OPR parameters needs to be defined in measurable and verifiable terms.