Dee Davis (00:00)
A company's
internal quality department should be completely independent of construction execution, not the same people as the ones installing the work. The person in charge of company QC should not be in the reporting chain to construction or project management.
Just like safety can't report to construction, it's for the very same reason you want to eliminate the potential for a conflict of interest.
Good morning and welcome to the Management Under Construction podcast. I'm your host, Dee Davis, and today we are going to talk about quality. well, for those of you that know me and talk to me on a regular basis, you know that my whole day right now is about quality. All day, every day. I am in a construction quality lead position right now on a major project. So all day, every day, my job
Is construction quality. I wanted to talk about why construction quality is important and why is it important for you as a contractor of any discipline to have a construction quality program in place. Why is this important? How does it help you?
First, let's discuss the different aspects of construction quality. First, there is a big difference between quality control and quality assurance. Quality control, or QC as it's often called, is internal to the contractor performing the work.
Quality assurance is the owner's side, which is often done by a third party that is not installing the work and is not affiliated with the general contractor. So they work directly for the owner and are looking out for the owner's best interest. Therefore, they cannot be influenced by anything. And all these quality programs are really about not having a conflict of interest.
So the purpose of having an internal quality program is to make sure that your company as a whole is holding to the same quality standards regardless of who is actually performing the work. You don't want crew A and crew B and crew C to be all doing radically different things and out there spreading your name and your reputation in an inconsistent way. You want to make sure that everybody's singing from the same piece of music.
So that your company can produce the same quality work across the board. And the only way to really do that is to have a written internal quality control program. So for example, if you hire a contractor, you want everybody on that crew working towards the same outcome. You don't want to make it dependent on each independent person's judgment. So how is internal quality control achieved? A company's
internal quality department should be completely independent of construction execution, i.e. not the same people as the ones installing the work. In fact, they really can't be. The person in charge of company QC should not be in the reporting chain to construction or project management. They should be completely separate reporting structure, then construction
Just like safety can't report to construction, it's for the very same reason you want to eliminate the potential for a conflict of interest. Let me just give you an example.
If quality points out a problem and they report directly to construction management or project management, it's possible that construction management or project management could tell them, we're not going to worry about that, keep going, and override their authority. That's not true quality program, if that's really happening. Those reporting structures need to be completely independent.
Of each other, just like safety is for the very same reason. Does your company have a written quality control plan? I once worked for a company for a number of years, and I had no idea that we had a written quality control plan until a client asked for it. We had a QC manager, although I really had no idea what he did all day because we never interfaced in any way, which in retrospect.
was a little bit scary. Considering I was running the construction crews I should have been having significant interface with quality and I was having none. I asked the quality control manager, hey, do we have this thing called a QC plan? And he said, yeah, we have one and we're all supposed to be following it. And I said, really? Because I've worked here for several years and I didn't even know it existed. No training has ever been provided.
This is an extremely common point of failure that I see in quality programs. You can have the best quality program in the world written up, but if nobody knows it exists, nobody's reading it, nobody's being trained on it, it might as well be toilet paper, which is kind of the situation that I was in. I was quite embarrassed with my client that I didn't know that we even had a quality plan and I couldn't answer the question. Not a good look.
The other point of failure that I often see is that there is no written plan. And QC is just assigned as a collateral duty to the installation crew. I'm not saying this always fails, but there's a good chance this is going to fail because you're relying on that individual installation crew to have high quality standards. And as we all know, that isn't always the case. You're taking a big chance if you're leaving it.
To the individual crews to decide what good looks like. It's kind of a recipe for problems. So, how is quality control, which is again the contractor? You can remember that QC, the C is for contractor. How is it different from quality assurance, or as very often referred to as QA? QA is done by the owner, generally a third party on behalf of the owner.
Sometimes they have specific certifications for things like welding, paint and coatings, concrete, steel, maybe even electrical. What makes a good quality control or quality assurance person? First, they need to be familiar with the applicable codes and standards to whatever type of work.
We're looking at. They need to be familiar with the specific plans and specifications of that project because that is the standard that we're building to, in addition to the quality control plans. They need to be familiar with the manufacturer's installation instructions for that particular item that they are looking at. They need to be familiar with the companies.
Individual QC plans. This happens all the time. Where, from a quality standpoint, I'm looking at something and I'm saying, Well, in your quality plan, you said you were going to do this, this, and this, you skip this step. You have to know what the plan says before you can enforce it being done in the field. The other really, really critical point is that you must have as a quality person.
The authority to stop work. If you don't have the authority to stop work, it lessens the effectiveness of your quality plan and your quality program on your site. A quality person, whether they're QA or they're QC, should be able to stop the crew if they see them doing something wrong. They should be able to fail an inspection, and whether it's an internal or an external inspection.
And say this does not comply with plans, code, spec, manufacturers, installation instructions. They need to have the authority to stop work in the event that something doesn't comply. The quality roles don't replace a building inspector role for permit sign-offs. This is not the same thing.
Quality starts from the very beginning of making sure that we have the right materials coming onto the project, going through fabrication, getting installed into the building, how it's getting installed, where it's getting installed, how it's being tested. We have these things called inspection and test plans that tell us what's supposed to happen and they're made right out of the specifications.
If the specification says that this test must occur, then the inspection test plan will reflect that. for instance, in the example of a pipe test, it's going to have to be this type of medium, it's going to have to go at this pressure for this duration. And it tells you what your pass-fail criteria is.
Having people that are going back and verifying that all this stuff is happening as it's written in the plans and the specifications and compliance with the codes and standards is a quality person's job. So why is this important? Well, it's not because people are inherently bad or just don't do their jobs, but there's a lot of moving parts in construction.
Every single day there is a flurry of activity that goes on. And it doesn't mean if somebody makes a mistake or skips a step that they're doing it to be a bad person. They are doing it because they're just getting a little overwhelmed. Maybe they didn't read their own quality plan and didn't know they were supposed to do that. I have that happen quite a bit. It's happened to me.
So it doesn't mean that the person is a bad person or that they're necessarily even trying to get away with something. But you have to have this focused attention on quality in construction. It's sort of trust but verify, and making sure that somebody's whole job is to make sure that everybody's doing all the steps and following all of the rules so that at the end of the day we have materials.
and systems that work as designed. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you next time.
