Over the past 30 years Quality Assurance has become an integral part of most Australian construction projects. Projects with a total value in excess of A$10 billion are now delivered each year under Quality Assured contracts.
There has been very little assessment of the effectiveness of contractor’s Quality Assurance, but infrastructure owners have expressed concerns that it is not working as effectively as it should. Some compare the priority and effort given to quality assurance with the effort put into safety management where there are powerful incentives (and sanctions) compelling companies and managers to perform. In contrast, the economic reality facing a contractor’s QA is that the primary drivers in the highly competitive construction market are time and cost and, inevitably, there are occasions where quality compliance may be at the expense of time and cost. Unfortunately, the consequences of defects may not be apparent for many years after a contract is completed.
Over the past decade many infrastructure owners have recognised a need for some form of independent verification that the contractor’s QA is delivering specified outcomes. Different models have been adopted, but again there has been very little assessment of relative effectiveness.
SKM has been involved as Independent Verifier/Reviewer under most of the current models and has served clients in these roles on a number of major road projects. These have included Melbourne’s CityLink and EastLink, Sydney’s Westlink M7, Adelaide’s Port River Expressway and Brisbane’s Gateway Arterial Upgrade. This experience has given us an understanding of the challenges facing effective quality assurance and has enabled us to continually improve our processes and systems for verification.
We believe that there is an opportunity for collaboration between infrastructure clients and the construction industry to establish better practices.
Some principles we would suggest for discussion are:
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Infrastructure owners are ultimately responsible for ensuring quality outcomes and procuring effective arrangements for quality assurance and independent verification. Careful consideration needs to be given to the procurement model to ensure the independence of the verifier and the ability of the owner to determine the scope and cost of verification required
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The purpose of independent verification should be to make the contractor’s Quality Assurance process more accountable, not to duplicate it. This requires a significant change in some of the approaches adopted by verifiers (and specified by owners) in the past
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The independent verification process should be systematic, well planned, measurable and responsive to the level of confidence in the Contractor’s QA system effectiveness. More intensive verification should be allocated to the construction operations with a higher risk of adverse outcomes – ie. those with more significant consequences in terms of reduced product performance, greater complexity and/or greater program pressure.
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Careful consideration must be given to the required skills and experience of verification personnel and the capability of the verifier’s monitoring and reporting systems.
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SKM is keen to share its experience and approach to verification with industry stakeholders. We firmly believe that there is an opportunity to achieve better practice in this vital area of infrastructure delivery.
It should be noted that independent verification of engineering design has not been discussed in this article. There is no question that it is also a very important issue that warrants debate.
© Sinclair Knight Merz
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Who does this affect?
Quality Assurance (QA) is at the heart of any good infrastructure project. Despite that there has been very little research into the effectiveness of QA in the road construction industry, which is surprising given the size of this annual investment.
What do I need to do?
This articles aims to identify issues with current Quality Assurance arrangements and to canvas opinion on initiatives that can be taken by the industry to improve QA effectiveness.
Author: Peter Balfe
Peter is former Deputy Chief Executive of VicRoads and currently Independent Reviewer for the Eastlink Road Project - Australia’s newest tollway, connecting the Monash, Eastern and Frankston Freeways - in Melbourne. He has established effective quality systems for key corporate processes, including VicRoads project management and contract management systems.
© Sinclair Knight Merz
Requests to re-publish achieve articles should be made here