Construction Quality Assurance/Quality Control Blog

Your Project Quality Plan is in place. You think all contingencies are covered. You assume inspections are being conducted correctly. You figure your plan is being followed, your customer is happy, and your project is flowing smoothly, right?

Quality, safety, scheduling, administrative issues and, above all, how to keep your customer satisfied. These are the principal reasons you should hold a pre-construction meeting. A well-structured pre-construction meeting helps ensure that your project proceeds smoothly. It also eliminates confusion and ruffled feathers when you're faced with the inevitable issues that arise during a project.

For this discussion, we’ll focus on handling the QA/QC part of your preconstruction meeting. I’ll give you a few general guidelines, and then discuss the key topic areas you should cover.

Whether you’re dealing with difficult or simple nonconformances, your construction quality control plan should outline a systematic process to manage them. That way, you’ll consistently deliver quality results. And, your customers will have confidence that you tightly control specification deviations until you can find suitable resolutions.

If you find yourself complaining about field personnel not taking construction project quality seriously, then this article should help you find some solutions.

A communication plan will help you organize how you will create, collect, and distribute quality control-related information to your construction project quality team. I see a lot of projects where this planning isn’t done ahead of time and everyone has to figure this out bit by bit as they go along.  Quality communications are too important to be left to chance.  

Construction Quality Control Plans range in size from under 30 pages to over 200 pages, from simple to comprehensive. So, how do you know what's the right construction quality control plan for your contract and company needs?

While both Construction Quality Control Plans and Inspection and Test Plans are intended to control construction quality, your construction QC plan will focus on a wide-range of elements. Whereas, your inspection and test plan (ITP) will only focus on inspections and tests as a means of quality control.

When construction inspections find defects, should they be handled simply as punch list items that need to be corrected (but need no special record keeping), or should they be managed as construction nonconformances that include the extra procedures and record keeping? The following guidelines will help you decide and should keep your quality record keeping as simple as possible.

The “hold” in “hold point” refers to putting a hold on construction activities until an inspection is passed.  Construction inspection hold points are particularly important when work cannot be inspected later because a problem could be covered up. For example, a hold point before a concrete pour permits verification of steel reinforcing before it is covered with concrete.

Standard operating procedures are written instructions that explain the work steps you use to carrying out your construction quality methods and policies.

I’m going to explain how to write standard operating procedures for your construction quality plan. But, first, let me explain why you should have them.

Why you need SOPs