The world was greatly affected during the COVID-19 Pandemic. There were bans on travelling, self-isolation and quarantine conditions, and the social distancing precautions were greatly observed in a bid to reduce the spread of the infection.
It is true that the world has to move past this incident, and that services and products have to be delivered. But however, maintaining the usual methods of doing this seems to not be sufficient anymore. Also, the new bans and precautions seems to have become a normalized process, and as such we need to collectively face this fact, and establish a working process on how to carry out our activities and adapt with alternative options as regards Commissioning of facilities.
It is worthy of note that for mission critical and Data Center facilities, they need experts and specialists all across the world. Due to the recent development of precautionary measures deployed by the government, project owners and safety experts, restrictions have been made on construction sites and commissioning exercises to ensure that the job is done in a more secure and timely approach.
At construction sites, it has been observed that the social distancing precautions have been implemented, with workers having to put on face covering and undergoing periodic temperature checks all in a bid to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
We have observed that some government agencies have gone the extra mile by placing some restrictions on commissioning activities, making it more difficult.
The ban on travel and physical appearance of specialized professionals has been as a result of this pandemic.
With the restrictions imposed on travels, commissioning experts and professionals often find it more difficult getting to the site to be commissioned and might request a longer time frame to enable them to arrive successfully.
Some of the measures that cause this delay could be the self isolation period of approximately two weeks upon arriving at a new country, which is mandatory before being allowed to report to the commissioning site. Also, they face difficulty in accessing flights that would transport them as there has been a great reduction in flight activities during this period.
Alternatively, we have opted for a more remote approach to the commissioning process. Recently applications such as zoom, Microsoft, Web-ex and other applications that allow for video conferencing have proven to be significantly useful during this era. However, this remote approach entails proper planning and coordination of activities.
The success of any commissioning project is dependent on the quality of the remote application used for the access and the work delivery carried out on the site.
