Your delivery director signs the final milestone certificate for the main civils package. Every contractor reports green on their own schedule and budget, yet the mechanical and electrical teams discover that power isolation points and access platforms were never coordinated.
The PMO tool records percentage complete against each contract line item. It contains no required field for interface completion status, so the dashboard stays clean even when one package's design change invalidates another's commissioning sequence.
Commissioning teams therefore inherit a stack of untested handshakes. They spend the first six weeks of the phase chasing missing penetrations, mismatched protocols and undocumented cable routes that individual contractors had no incentive to resolve earlier.
The result is predictable: contingency that was meant for latent defects gets burned on coordination work that should have been closed out during construction. Asset owners absorb the overrun because the contracts treat interfaces as after-the-fact disputes rather than live deliverables.
Switch the PMO measurement to joint milestones with named owners on both sides of every interface. Tie a visible portion of each contractor's final payment to verified handover data, not just their own schedule line.
Without that change, every new capital program repeats the same pattern. Construction finishes on paper, commissioning slips by months, and the operating cost of the asset starts higher than the business case ever allowed.