Commissioning Waits on the Owner's IT Department
Your commissioning crew is mobilized, on site, and idle, waiting on a help desk ticket. No one on the GC's schedule owns that date.
Other trades get gated by predecessors who work off the same schedule and answer to the same superintendent. Your predecessor is a corporate IT department with its own change control window, its own security review, and zero contractual duty to the construction schedule. The GC has no leverage there, so the schedule pressure rolls downhill onto you.
The size of it
Mobilized commissioning labor costs full rate with no recoverable cause of delay, because the owner's IT being slow has no change order path written into your subcontract.
Two gates come between you and a commissioned system. The first is the AV submittal package, rack elevations, signal flow one-lines, and cut sheets to the consultant, and at least that one lives on a schedule. The second gate is the one that never gets scheduled, and it consists of VLANs, static IPs, switch ports, certificates, firewall rules, and domain accounts from the owner's IT and security group. Until those exist, not one networked DSP, Teams room, or IP camera can be commissioned, and that group answers to the owner rather than to the general contractor.
Three moves, in order
Step 06: Project management
Billing dates, change orders, and notices, written as standards that work without anyone following up on them.
What else costs low voltage and AV contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What low voltage and AV owners ask
Charging for commissioning delays when client IT hasn't opened ports?
Your commissioning crew is mobilized, on site, and idle, waiting on a help desk ticket. No one on the GC's schedule owns that date.
What does it cost?
Mobilized commissioning labor costs full rate with no recoverable cause of delay, because the owner's IT being slow has no change order path written into your subcontract.
What do I do first?
Attach a network readiness checklist to the subcontract listing every item you need from IT, with a required-by date tied to your commissioning start.
What are low voltage and AV contractors supposed to be making?
Low voltage and AV has 24% gross margin, 16% overhead and 8% net profit after taxes at $1M to $5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade is 1 point above it. The CFOS target is 11.5%.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 06, project management. Billing dates, change orders, and notices, written as standards that work without anyone following up on them. It comes from chapter 6 of CONTROL: C.F.O.S. Construction Financial Operating System.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, and CONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for low voltage and AV contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, led by the same author.
What a fractional CFO does for low voltage and AV contractors
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.