Justin Kirby, co-founder & facilitator of the Digital Operations Working Group, reflects on practical insights needed to deliver traditional commissioning in construction and why this is crucial to the success of the digital handshake
The built environment is finally confronting a decades-long failure in how buildings are delivered. Construction might take only three years, but running the building governs the next sixty. That operational phase accounts for at least 70% of whole-life costs and creates most of the asset’s value.
At Digital Construction Week (DCW), the industry moved past talk and into direct action to fix this gap. To tackle standard fatigue, we officially launched the Digital Operations Working Group (DOWG) in a formal partnership with nima and the Construction Leadership Council (CLC).
Operating under the banner of IM4DO (Information Management for Digital Operations), this collaboration establishes practical operational crosswalks that are missing from current standards.
While the IMI aims to support the adoption of ISO 19650 across the full lifecycle, traditional delivery remains trapped in a loop. It looks left to right, focusing entirely on meeting construction compliance requirements rather than starting with operational outcomes. This structural blind spot is exactly why the project-to-operations gap never gets resolved. To change this, the DOWG uses a strict “Right-to-Left” approach, ensuring the entire process is driven by the client’s real-world operational needs rather than just delivering a massive construction data dump at handover.
To ensure the logic of our Playbook framework holds up in the real world, we brought industry experts together for an inaugural closed-door roundtable back in May to stress-test it.
However, building that initial structure is only the first step. The strategy faces its greatest challenge at the exact point of handover and operational verification, where the rubber hits the road.
Because this specific transition is so critical to the success of the digital handshake, it was examined not just during the roundtable but subsequently brought into the public realm at DCW as a dedicated panel session.
What follows is a recap of the practical insights from both sessions, focusing on why traditional commissioning struggles to deliver and how the industry is beginning to address it.
The evolution of commissioning: The new operational start line
The overwhelming consensus across both rooms is that commissioning must change. It cannot remain a rushed, end-of-project box-ticking exercise or a disconnected seasonal inspection months after handover. Instead, it must evolve into a continuous digital validation tool and framework, serving as the active mechanism that ensures a functional digital handshake between the construction teams and the operators.
When this commissioning bridge is ignored, handovers risk defaulting to an unverified asset data dump. The feedback from the field shows that incoming facilities management teams are left with fragmented, broken information, and are routinely forced to allocate budget for independent asset surveys the second they take over the contract, simply to establish an operational baseline.
Early commissioning engagement vs. the value engineering trap
To protect long-term performance, the clear trend from these discussions is that independent commissioning specialists must be brought into the room early during the upfront design phase, rather than being treated as a late add-on. The critical window immediately prior to Practical Completion (pre-PC) represents the primary opportunity to secure performance assurance using the contractor’s capital expense (CapEx) budget.
The primary value of early commissioning lies in validating design briefs against practical, long-term operations. By witnessing and pressure-testing the design as it evolves, specialists ensure that high-level project goals aren’t compromised by short-sighted changes, such as removing low-cost sensors on a chiller to save minor upfront CapEx. The specialist provides the foresight to challenge these specific cuts, demonstrating how stripping away granular data blinds future automation and analytics. Ultimately, they ensure the initial design intent is preserved, preventing owners from making heavy retroactive investments later just to buy back basic Day Zero data utility.
Frontline verification: 100% witness testing in chaotic environments
The DCW commissioning panel brought back roundtable veterans Joanna Harris and Jordan Collins, alongside Mike Darby. We intentionally brought in Dean Jelfs, Technical Director at Dome Consulting, to inject the missing, highly specialised perspective of the independent Commissioning Agent (CxA). While the industry blindly fixates on data schemas, the independent Commissioning Agent is the on-site person responsible for ensuring that physical reality matches digital intent.
The panel highlighted that traditional commissioning is often squeezed and relies on manual spot-checks that typically test only 10% of devices. Shifting to Monitoring-Based Commissioning (MBCx) with digital platforms can enable 100% digital witnessing. Crucially, these platforms can also be utilised in the chaotic environment of active construction sites, where central networks are still being built, allowing teams to verify performance quantitatively long before the building is complete.
Dismantling the zero-defect myth
The panel consensus rejected the expectation of a zero-defect handover on day one as unrealistic for modern, complex buildings. Instead, the focus must shift toward total data transparency. Recording defects cleanly within a digital dashboard at the point of handover addresses two distinct operational challenges. It supports the Golden Thread of building safety while simultaneously safeguarding long-term performance. This data provides incoming operations teams with a clear, verifiable list of items to be resolved during the defect’s liability period, rather than leaving a legacy of unrecorded flaws.
The commissioning data language barrier
A critical friction point identified in the sessions is the disconnect between construction classifications, such as Uniclass, and operational standards, such as SFG20 or CIBSE Guide M. Resolving this data language barrier is exactly what the Asset Data Services (ADS) Alliance is tackling. Their work feeds directly into the government’s mandatory FMS 002 standard and forms a core block of our playbook.
However, even the most robust framework logic rarely survives its first contact with reality on an active construction site. This transition is exactly where the theoretical rubber hits the physical road. Modern commissioning has evolved to be just as much about validating the data and analytics themselves as checking the physical hardware. Turning data standards into operational truth requires pairing the structured logic of the framework with digital validation at the coalface. This practical dependency explains exactly why a commissioning perspective is required at the playbook development table.
Conclusion: A jigsaw puzzle without the box
The insights gathered from these two sessions do not represent a definitive roadmap for the sector, nor do they claim to conclude the debate. Moving the industry forward requires capturing different perspectives, and this field report is simply a playback of an unfolding market conversation that we are helping to facilitate.
While this report focuses specifically on the role of commissioning to reflect the core of the roundtable and panel discussions, validation is only one piece of a jigsaw puzzle where there is currently no picture on the box. Achieving a functional digital handshake means the industry must stop handing over scattered fragments and finally start connecting the pieces across the entire asset lifecycle. Beyond commissioning, our launch event and broader programme brought together a wider ecosystem of stakeholders, and we intend to share further insights from those discussions as they develop.
To read the insights generated during the initial stage of this conversation, the Demand Logic Roundtable Field Report is available to download directly from their website.
Acknowledgements
This field report plays back a collaborative market conversation. Huge thanks are owed to the strategic leads who contributed their frontline experience, technical insight, and perspective to both the closed-door May roundtable and the subsequent Digital Construction Week panel session: Steven Boyd MBE and Gordon Mitchell (DOWG), Mike Darby and Nick LK Smith (Demand Logic), Dean Jelfs (Dome Consulting), Joanna Harris (Sodexo), Jordan Collins and Andy Simpson (SES Engineering Services / Wates Group), Alex Plenty (Skanska), Paul Bullard (SFG20), Graeme McClelland (CBRE Global Workplace Solutions), Robert Miles (Troup Bywaters + Anders), and Linda Wade (Spinview).
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