We frequently engage with construction companies aiming to enhance customer satisfaction through effective construction quality control and quality assurance. Within these firms, builders grapple with the challenge of managing quality, especially when dealing with employees of diverse experience levels. Despite the differences, the common goal is to achieve the highest quality on their construction projects, each employing unique strategies to meet this objective.
If this sounds familiar to you, you're probably looking for a way to capture the most effective quality management processes and methods and share them with everyone.
This is a common challenge for organizations that operate in multiple locations and have several projects going on at the same time, but it can happen in companies of all sizes. The solution is to build a company-wide quality management process and streamline their quality planning in order to see a quality improvement. This process will ensure you improve construction quality management on any construction project you have your hands on.
Every superintendent and project manager develop their own methods for construction quality management, and have their own ways to create a quality management plan, and even though the methods might work, they are all different. This can cause a lot of problems for you. For example, company personnel that work with different superintendents will have to learn new quality control procedures and quality management processes for every job. At a higher level, ensuring your quality standards are great is complex. Their measurement across projects gets more difficult and possibly too labour-intensive to undertake. If you have ever tried to gather and analyze data from multiple systems, you'll understand why this is so challenging and sometimes impossible. There is only so much you can do with spreadsheets.
While it's great that everybody is fully engaged in quality management, not having a consistent quality control plan could be hindering your ability to achieve first-time quality and affect your business processes.
Benefits of a Consistent Approach to Construction Quality Management
Introducing any new system or approach can be daunting, but developing a company-wide quality management program that everybody follows is worth the effort as it will make your construction process smooth and stress-free. Shifting to a consistent approach toward quality management offers many benefits, such as the ability to:
- Move people seamlessly between projects
- Measure results across multiple projects
- Provide consistent training to personnel and subcontractors
- Track performance of subcontractors across multiple projects
- Use your quality program as a selling point to new clients
- Apply best practices across the entire organization
If just one of these benefits is attractive to you, it’s probably worth exploring how to be more consistent with quality management.
It is no secret that the construction industry has many ins-and-outs as the failure of adhering to your construction quality processes may have a catastrophic outcome both for you and your clients.
How to Implement a Consistent Approach to Quality Management
One of the reasons you might be struggling to find a consistent approach to quality management is that there are countless ways to do it. However, that doesn’t mean every method is a good one. Use these tips to achieve better consistency within your company:
Get On the Same Page About Goals
Your company might already be there, but it’s always a good idea to reinforce the organizational goals with respect to quality and strive to keep improving construction quality management processes that are currently in place. If you are always striving for first-time quality, make it part of the company’s language and keep the conversation going. First-time quality is not a one-time achievement; it requires an ongoing process that must always be improved.
Be Collaborative, Not Controlling
Fostering a collaborative team approach is paramount when striving for excellence in both quality construction and construction project management. Engaging superintendents in the process from the outset enhances their receptiveness to change. By creating a forum for sharing individual best practices, these insights can be seamlessly woven into a new, more effective system. This collaborative environment not only promotes teamwork but also serves as a valuable opportunity for superintendents and project managers to glean insights from one another, sharing experiences in refining their respective quality management and quality assurance processes.
Choose a Single Construction Quality Management System
Take an inventory of all the systems you are currently using. This includes any software systems, spreadsheets, and paper forms that every superintendent and project manager uses. This exercise will likely demonstrate that it's time to change to a more consistent quality control process. Decide whether any of these existing systems can handle all of your quality management needs. If you don’t already have one, consider adopting an integrated construction quality management software solution to keep all of your data and functions in one place.
Roll Out a Consistent Program Incrementally
When people feel overwhelmed, it's difficult for them to adopt new behaviours, and they will revert to the comfort of old habits instead of focusing on continuous improvement. Give them the space to embrace a consistent system by rolling it out in bite-sized chunks. Start with a simple concept like inspection checklists and build on other concepts as your team gets more comfortable.
You will eventually need to address all of the following questions in your construction quality management system:
- Which inspections must be completed and at what frequency to get their first-time quality targets?
- Who is going to perform them?
- How will deficiencies be handled?
- Whose performance will you measure?
- How are you going to measure performance?
These are big questions that you might not be able to answer right away. If you need guidance in your efforts to take a consistent approach to construction quality management, FTQ360 is here to help. Contact us today to learn more.
