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Quality management in construction

What is quality management in construction?

Construction projects span a number of functions across a number of
specialty parties and trades, but the one thing they all share in common is
their desire to deliver quality work - on time and on budget.

Quality management is a key pillar of overall construction project

management, and is often the difference between company's success and
failure.

Quality management in construction is the policies, processes and

procedures put in place (typically by management) to improve an
organisation's ability to deliver quality to its customers - whether those
customers are clients/owners, contractors or subcontractors - on a
consistent and constantly improving basis.

While every construction company on earth wants to deliver quality on every

phase of works and every project, it is the establishing of these internal and
external principles and guidelines which actually results in quality.

The major objectives of quality management are:

To minimise the defects on asset delivery or handover

To identify and solve defects and issues before your customers do -
safeguarding your reputation

Achieving these objectives carries some many obvious bene ts - none more
bene cial than continuing to get more work and building a strong positive
reputation.

Creating a quality management plan for

construction projects
Preventing mistakes is much more time and cost effective than correcting
them - which is why establishing a strong quality management plan is a good
way to improve quality. The upfront investment of creating a coherent and
comprehensive quality management plan often pays big dividends
throughout the life of a project.

Outlined in your quality plan will be four (4) main sections which establish
your:

1. Quality policies
2. Quality objectives (clear and measurable)
3. Requirement standards (ISO accreditations etc.)
4. Other statutory and legal requirements

As you can see, a quality management plan is both an internal and external
tool for construction companies. It ensures that you are adhering to and
meeting the necessary quality standards to do work legally and feasibly - and
that you are structuring your internal quality control policies and objectives in
a way that enables that continuous improvement and ultimately good
performance.

Establishing quality procedures

Once a quality plan is established and your 'goal posts' are set, the next
obvious phase of quality management is to create procedures which enable
you to achieve your objectives.

This phase of quality management design is often more troublesome for

companies, as the quality management starts to involve more moving pieces
i.e it's easier to sit down and plan than it is to create processes for tens or
hundreds of people who then need to be trained and monitored etc.

In saying this, there are four (4) key areas of process focus which when
tackled individually or through a comprehensive quality management system
or software come together to form this critical process alignment. These key
areas are:

1. Control of documents and records

2. Internal quality audits
3. Control of non-conformances
4. CAPA (corrective and preventative actions)

As you can see, these quality procedures form a stack through the way that
your work moves - from site capture (documents and records) through to
corrective and preventative actions (actioning what is captured on site).

Quality management forms and

documentation
The quality management process typically starts with those quality
management documents - which tend to be plan oriented and
comprehensive in nature - outlining and summarising quality management at
a high level.

Great quality management process on projects focuses more on how quality

is captured, organised and tracked from point where quality matters most -
on site.

There are tens or hundreds of quality management forms ranging from

simple quality punch lists, hold points and witness points, ITP's (inspection
and test plans) and specialty quality forms like welding quality control
checklists.

These forms are deployed to engineers, project managers and other workers
to ensure that quality is being met - and to inform management or other
people where quality has not been met, so that it can be xed and actioned
by the necessary party.

Some companies and teams manage these forms and documentation with
paper-based forms, word docs and PDFs, while others use digital forms
which enable greater quality standardisation, control and insight.

Outside of these forms and documents - photos, videos and other records
are also essential to ensuring quality records are up to scratch for any
eventuality including audits.

See the Sitemate free quality template

See the library →
library.

Quality assurance vs. quality control

Quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) both sit within the broader category of quality
management in construction, but they do have different roles and outputs than one another.

At a high level, quality assurance covers activities from design, development, production
and installation and is designed to ensure your customers 'know' your work will be quality;
while quality control is more focused on monitoring the actual quality of nished products
through objective measurements and numbers.

Both quality assurance and quality control form critical elements of quality management.
Without quality assurance, it's hard to build con dent working relationships with other parties
who rely on your quality assurance and quality plans to make decisions about whether or not to
work with you. And without quality control, it's hard to understand how you are tracking in terms
of quality - and impossible to make data driven decisions about what needs to be improved.

You also need this quality control data to feed into your quality assurance plans and objectives in
order to facilitate the feedback loop and enable improvement.

The different levels of quality control you need

it helps to break quality management down into a couple of layers. It makes it more digestible
and more manageable for management and individual project teams.

For management, the level of quality management which must be focused on is organisational
level quality control.

The keys to organisational quality control are derived from the levers you have at an organisation
level - your processes and procedures, and your resources. You'll want to oversee the systematic
implementation of systems and tools which can be rolled out across projects and teams, and
you'll want to resource appropriately as well as train and manage appropriately to ensure that
projects and activities have what they need in terms of human and other capital to get the job
done within the quality standards set.

The next level done is project level quality management, which is usually handled by a
combination of management level personnel as well as project level workers including project
managers who understand how quality is being assured and delivered in the eld.

At this layer, quality assurance concerns and tools are established to make sure that project level
information and insights are being captured, organised and tracked properly - and then sent to
the right places so that the company and project managers understand what's happening and
can make good decisions which result in good projects.

And nally, we have the team and technical layer of quality management. At this level, teams
and companies are concerned with the actual output of work and how people, equipment and
tools are being used to ensure that the jobs being done are being performed within the
acceptable limits.

We stated that this article had all you need to know about quality management, but this is
obviously not true. Quality management is a big and broad topic and spans across
accreditations, individual tactics and more.

We have plenty more quality information available, but more than that, we have plenty of quality
management resources, documents, forms and software tools you can use to improve how you
manage and deliver quality every day. Check them out on this 'site'.

Construction Quality Control Plan template Quality Assurance Plan for Construction
Complete thorough and professional quality Build and maintain a quality assurance plan like
control plans which impress your clients and this to build con dence amongst your
contractors. stakeholders.

See the template → See the template →

People in 70+ countries use this quality management system to

improve the quality and outcomes of their work.

See how

Sitemate is exible project managament software which enables companies in

the industries to streamline their projects, teams and forms - their way.

Try the software for free Learn more →

Posted in Construction, Quality

About Lance Hodgson

Lance is the Head of Marketing & Growth at Sitemate. His aim is to bring awareness to a brighter future for the
heavy industries where people and companies work smarter.

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