We believe that defects are preventable and that achieving First Time Quality construction is possible for everyone.
If you agree, then First Time Quality Plans, construction quality control, and appointing an efficient quality manager will be key business goals. Today, our focus is on how quality control plans can significantly enhance your overall construction business, providing objective evidence of what happened and why, particularly in every product development project.
If your main priorities are different though, you may want to explore some of the other business goals we focus our attention.
What are First time Quality plans?
First Time Quality Plans is an approach to construction that focuses on managing project quality aims for zero-defect construction. This approach focuses on making sure you can get your project finished without needing to redo anything
The Maturity Model
Our team here at FTQ360 has devised a Maturity Model that defines the performance level of a Quality Management Program. This model includes the roles of quality inspectors, who assess the construction process and ensure adherence to a comprehensive quality plan. The Maturity Model provides a blueprint to indicate the acceptance criteria on a scale from one to four – from basic and professional to advanced and expert levels.
To create the Maturity Model, we took into account the key tasks and activities that make up the best practice quality control plan, and use these ten categories to group them: organization, management, strategy, accountability, planning, processes, quality controls, measurement, improvement, technology.
In this article, we explain what you need to do to reach Level Two in the Construction Quality Management and Quality Assurance – Maturity Model but before we begin, how about finding out what just level you are at right now?
Take your very own Assessment
We have created a powerful Maturity Assessment that will quickly and easily pin-point your position on the four-level scale. Just by answering a few simple questions, you can establish the current sophistication of your Quality Management program and how far you have already come on your journey towards achieving your quality objectives and First Time Quality excellence.
Level Two of the Maturity Model
Our previous blog Construction quality excellence: Reaching level one focuses on setting the foundations of a good quality program and explains the Maturity Model in a bit more detail so it may be worth a quick read too.
Level Two: Professional
By Level Two, most deficiencies have been seen before, allowing them to be anticipated and proactively eliminated through the implementation of specific inspection criteria, product specifications, and testing requirements. This leads to a dramatic improvement in the quality provided to the customer, resulting in reduced operating costs compared to industry standards.
1. Create professional-grade inspection reports You can proudly present easy-to-read reports – covering the full suite of quality inspection activities and performance trends – to your clients to help them stay abreast of your quality management initiatives, and even supplier performance for internal purposes if that's what you wish.
To streamline your quality management operations, you should have a range of submittal-ready ‘online’ inspection reports ready to document compliance issues – ideally including pictures, measurements and observations. We also recommend keeping a full transaction history for all inspections across projects and clients.
2. Advanced technology-enabled checklist features You can use the very latest technology to adapt pre-existing checklists to meet the needs of your unique inspection process. To reduce the burden of undertaking repetitive inspection tasks, you should utilize dynamic features designed to streamline the process.
Consider that there are over twenty types of inspection checkpoints that allow collection of a wide array of quality standards.
We recommend you use reason and corrective action codes and set checkpoint risk factors for project risk assessments.
3. Develop a library of checklist templates You can quickly and easily create a library of checklists – each adapted to the specific scope of work for your company.
We recommend organizing commercial construction checklists – including material receiving, test reports, project management and safety checklists – by division of work and project milestone to help your team focus on the inspection task at hand. Checklists should also be used to help manage up-front engineering and design reviews.
4. Project quality planning and controls You can plan your inspections in advance and use them to guide the inspectors and keep the process on track. This pro-active approach will help ensure that you’ll never be surprised by a missed or late inspection again.
We recommend creating Inspection Test Plans (ITP) and tracking the completion progress using real-time performance dashboards and online management reports.
Form a solid foundation for a high-level quality management program
Our key takeaway message here is that you form a solid foundation for a high-level quality management program. It’s the second major step on the road to First Time Quality excellence.
You’ll find some of features of the FTQ360 Software Platform that will help you take control of your quality program with a high-level quality management system(QMS) here.
Pre-loaded Checklists Serious software ensuring accurate inspections from the whole team. Learn more
Consistent Processes Serious software ensuring accurate inspections from the whole team. Learn more
Documented Compliance Serious software providing the definitive proof of project compliance. Learn more
Comprehensive Quality Plans Serious software with inspection and test plans to keep your quality program on track. Learn more
If our Maturity Model sounds like it might be of interest, you can find out more about it and measure your own maturity score, by reading this recent article: How to assess the maturity level of your Quality Management program – good luck!
Over to you
We hope you found this blog article interesting and useful. If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch. At FTQ360, we're serious about quality. If you are too, we'd love to talk.
This blog is part of a series on the 4 levels of our Quality Management System Maturity Model.
Reaching Construction Quality Excellence - Reaching Level
Reaching Construction Quality Excellence - Reaching Level 3
Reaching Construction Quality Excellence - Reaching Level 4
