Evaluating Alternative Quality Management Systems for Civil Engineering Construction Presented at: The ASCE Joint Conference of the Texas Section and the Construction Institute Fort Worth, Texas, Friday, November 9, 2012 Danny L. Kahler, P.E.1 ABSTRACT
Traditional quality management systems for civil engineering have been based on the idea that more is better. In other words, more inspection, more sampling, and more testing results in more quality. However, stakeholders are beginning to learn that there is not a direct relationship between this brute force approach to controlling and assuring quality and the actual quality of the project. At the same time, stakeholders are also slashing budgets to reduce any activity that isn’t critical to the short term success of their projects, even if it may threaten long term success and sustainability, which is are ultimately the goals of modern quality management. Faced with the obsolescence of these traditional and legacy approaches to managing quality , civil engineers need the ability to objectively evaluate alternative methods to avoid shooting in the dark, i.e. picking an unfamiliar system without knowing it’s ultimate effect on the project goals. This session will present an approach to evaluating these alternative systems based on the their positive and negative characteristics within three areas: 1) Efficiency – the basic cost effectiveness of the system relative to the cost of the project, 2) Effectiveness – the reliability of the control and assurance of the system in preventing defects that could result in short or long term failures, and 3) Accountability – the clear assignment of responsibilities within the system to people who are not only qualified but publicly and professionally accountable. Using these three criteria for evaluation of a system will help to match the capabilities of any system to the unique risks and constraints of the type of project that’s being constructed.
1 Danny L. Kahler, PE, Kahler Engineering Group, 1244 Derby Drive, Suite 100, Dallas, Texas 75233 (512) 983-3453 email
[email protected]
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Background
The civil engineering profession has seen the practices for managing the cost and schedule of design and construction significantly evolve over the last half century. However, the practices for managing civil engineering quality have changed very little, even though other fields such as manufacturing, aerospace, and automotive have seen great process. Traditionally, civil engineering projects have been delivered by the design-bid-build process. The design team develops a project that they feel will meet the owner’s needs, both stated and unstated. Design engineers are required to control the quality of their own work, and external quality input usually comes in the form of “comments” generated from the review of each in-progress submittal. Engineering specialists within the civil engineering team estimate the quantities required, usually based on a standard set of pay items, and the expected costs of the bids. The plans, specifications, and estimates are prepared in a bid package and are advertised for bid. The lowest bid is usually accepted, and the contractor commits to constructing the project according to the plans and specifications. The contractor is expected to control the quality of their own work, and a construction engineering team assures the quality by verifying that the work meets the plans and specifications. This verification is usually in the form of detailed inspections, samples, and tests. This system has worked for the majority of the time that the civil engineering profession has existed, when the design-to-construction schedule stretched over years or decades, technology was consistent, labor was cheap, and information was collected manually. This is also how most of the civil engineering profession has been trained. However, in the past 15 years the delivery of civil engineering projects has probably changed more than it had during the entire previous history of the profession. New innovative delivery methods such as design-build, public-private-partnerships, and concessions are quickly replacing the traditional design-bid-build as the preferred model for the delivery of large civil engineering projects. Civil engineers and construction project managers have developed very sophisticated methods of controlling the project schedule and cost, and several third-party board certifications from professional organizations have been created to help assure the competence of the people implementing these new schedule and cost methods. But the methods of quality control and quality assurance have generally stayed where they had been back in the design-bid-build days. The endless repetitive cycle of inspect-sample-test-accept is repeated over and over again, even though modern industry has proven that mass inspection will never ensure quality when the processes that create the work still have flaws. Even the design quality methods have remained stagnant. Today we have design processes that can model the entire project in a computer, in the same coordinate ASCE Texas 2012 Fall Conference Fort Worth, Texas
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system that it’s going to be constructed in. The design model can even be transferred to construction to allow it to be built without a single sheet of paper. Yet the “quality assurance” of design is still based on the practice of printing an interim set of construction plans for the entire project, submitting multiple copies of these plans for review, waiting for comments from all the different parties reviewing them, and then having to respond to every single one of those comments prior to the next submittal, whether the comment is relevant to the quality of the design or not. It’s clear that we need some new systems to manage the quality of modern projects that address both changes in technology and delivery methods. But which one should we choose? The size of these projects are so large that we can’t risk experimenting with a quality system that may not be appropriate for the needs of the project. A Proposal for Improvement This paper proposes a framework within which a quality system can be evaluated to see if it will be appropriate to the needs of the project’s stakeholders, which includes, among others, the owners, the engineers, the contractors, the financers, and the users. This proposed framework would break each quality system down into three components: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Accountability Effectiveness - Does the quality system actually produce the desired outcome? How effective is the quality management system in ensuring that the all final work meets not just explicit but implicit quality requirements? The effectiveness may be independent of efficiency, and may include as much rework as necessary to guarantee that the final product meets all requirements. Efficiency – How much does the quality system cost compared to the costs it prevents? How efficient is the quality management system in generally preventing defects so that work meeting requirements is produced the first time, without rework? An efficient system may overlook the prevention of minor defects if the cost of identifying and correcting those minor defects is less that the cost required to completely prevent them. Accountability – How is the responsibility for quality assigned? Independent of effectiveness and efficiency, where does the system assign final accountability for quality? Does this accountability comply with all legal requirements? Is the accountable party a person or organization, or both? Does the accountability serve to enhance the confidence and trust in the quality of the work? Natural Biases Every system has a natural bias to one of these three criteria based on their environment where they are used. Some systems tend to focus on total effectiveness regardless of the cost. Effectiveness at the expense of cost is often found in high risk sectors, such nuclear power design and construction working under the NQA-1 quality ASCE Texas 2012 Fall Conference Fort Worth, Texas
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system. Other systems may focus more on how to minimize the cost of quality assurance even though all quality goals are not met. This view of quality is often found in residential construction and other land development, where scheduled sales or occupancy goals are the primary drivers. And still other systems may focus primarily on the accountability, tending to overlook issues of both effectiveness and efficiency if all of the required documentation is complete and signed by the appropriate authority. This view of quality is often found in government quality systems where the responsibility for overall performance is distributed among multiple organizations or suborganizations. By evaluating each system on all three criteria, both the strengths and the weaknesses of each system can be more easily brought to light. Evaluating Alternative Systems Within these three primary criteria, various factors can be rated. The factors from the contractor’s side would include, but not be limited to, the consistency of the work produced, the relative productivity of the system, the costs associated with using the system, the ability of the system to manage risk, the level of awareness and training required from the employees, the effect of the system on schedule, the amounts of staff needed to implement the system, turnaround on testing, overall performance of the constructed product, the assignment of risk required by the system, the role of the system in improving the contractor’s business performance, the effect of the system on management, and reduction of avoidable claims. The factors on the owner’s side would include both the immediate and life-cycle performance of the product, the cost of inspection and/or appraisal, the necessary amounts and/or skill levels of staff, managing the quality of overlapping or concurrent activities, the cost/benefits of incentives and disincentives, and the assignment of both primary and residual risk. It’s also important to compare each system will be contrasted to a baseline quality management approach, which we will assume to be comments-based plans review for the design quality process, and contractor quality control/owner verification and acceptance model for the construction quality process. This baseline system is typical for almost all design-bid-build project delivery. The contrasting will be done based on the three primary criteria as well as secondary criteria. Desirable Results The desirable result of evaluating any alternative quality management system is a report that breaks them down into terms that are understandable to personnel who currently use the baseline system. These terms would include familiar concepts such as contractor quality control (process control), verification sampling and testing, inspection of attributes, independent assurance, acceptance program, quality assurance, and plans comment resolution. ASCE Texas 2012 Fall Conference Fort Worth, Texas
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Many of the alternative quality management systems use advanced terminology in quality theory, which have come out of industries such as aerospace, automotive, and manufacturing. Some of these terms include alpha and beta risk, root cause analysis, lean, six sigma, leading and trailing indicators, and statistical process control, and are not traditionally taught in the typical highway design and construction environments. One task of evaluating these alternative systems would be to translate these concepts into terms that are familiar to those using the baseline system without losing their original meanings. While training in advanced quality concepts would be beneficial to these traditionally-trained personnel, it should not be necessary to have this advanced training in order to take advantage of what these alternative systems have to offer. A good analysis should be something that the average engineer will be quick pick up and reference because they find it very useful. It should break down each of these alternative systems into their fundamental components, and then clearly describe what that component is supposed to accomplish and who is responsible for it. It should also recommend what approach to contract language would be required to effectively implement those systems within project delivery. A comprehensive analysis should not just speak to engineers, but also the legislators and their assistants who write statutory language authorizing alternative project delivery and quality systems. There are cases where statutory language prohibits the deployment of alternative quality management systems on certain types of projects even though it has proven to be sound engineering on other projects. One example would be the Texas statute on design-build of non-highway transportation projects, such as light rail, where the statute prohibits the design-build team’s construction engineering firm from assuming the quality acceptance role even though it is permitted on highway design projects in Texas. An ultimate goal of the evaluation would be to serve as a one-stop-shop to review the basics of the various systems that are available without having to independently study the material from every different industry. Most quality systems are all derived from the same fundamental quality principles. In other words, the concepts have gone from the general to the specific. Once a person has been trained in a traditional quality management system, as most engineers and inspectors have been, that one system can serve as a platform to understand both the common factors and the differences between the other systems. In this case their understanding will go from the specific to the general. With a good evaluation in hand, personnel developing quality programs for project delivery can choose their desired levels of effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability to achieve their project goals without having to go through the trial and error of experimenting with random variations of the baseline system.
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