The fundamentals of Quality Assurance (QA) and it's impact on organisational performance
Sudeshan Mudali
Infrastructure Division Manager, CONQA
What is quality assurance and how does it impact organisational performance? Quality assurance (QA) is all about taking proactive measures to ensure that the processes, tools, and practices you implement meet necessary standards right from the beginning. A well executed quality management plan serves as the backbone of successful projects, laying a solid foundation for excellence.
This means aligning your organisations expectations with your customers so they result in the desired outcomes. We often observe that while customers may have excellent quality management plans, discussions about quality during on-site construction are almost non-existent. There can also be a significant disconnect between the project management team's expectations and the actual quality outputs. These issues often remain unresolved until the project is well underway or difficult conversations with stakeholders become unavoidable. This is why being proactive about a quality management plan is crucial. Once a plan is established, it’s essential to determine how it will function for each team, identify which aspects need adjustments to ensure effective teamwork, and most importantly, ensure project managers can seamlessly integrate the plan into new projects with minimal challenges.
Having a good quality management plan is important but being proactive about it is just as important. Why should organisations prioritise QA? It's about maintaining high standards, prioritising QA results in fewer reworks, reduced costs and ultimately better project outcomes.
How QA drives sustainability
As we strive for a sustainable future, quality management emerges as a crucial catalyst for sustainable change. Why? Because sustainability goes beyond merely using eco-friendly materials; it's about reducing waste, minimising rework, and ensuring project longevity. How can we minimise risks and cut rework costs? By focusing intently on quality. This involves capturing the right evidence at the right time, securing approvals, and understanding specific project requirements. Digitising your quality management plan allows for real-time monitoring and management of quality, reducing risks and delays while aligning with sustainability goals. Digital transformation plays a pivotal role here—it not only saves costs upfront but also standardise’s processes. By leveraging a digital platform, you can replicate sustainability and cost savings across every project. This digital-first approach enables the swift deployment of quality tools for new projects. Furthermore, an integrated quality management plan ensures that your team knows how to use these tools consistently across different projects. Repeating this process with similar clients leads to sustainable outcomes over time.
What is good quality assurance
What does good quality assurance look like at an organisational level? It's about having a clear structured approach that everyone can follow. It means standardising processes, leveraging digital tools for consistency and ensuring that every team member understands the importance of quality in every task they perform. This feeds directly back into creating sustainable outcomes and the fundamentals of QA. Being proactive and understanding how your quality management plan is managed by each of your different teams so that your teams can then better manage those quality outcomes. It's important that organisations take a step back to thoroughly and evaluate their projects, identifying what has been successful, what hasn't, and what changes are needed.
Now that we’ve made the change, the next step is implementing it with the right tools. By tools, I don’t just mean digital solutions; it’s also about understanding the resources you need, the size of your quality team, and identifying team members outside the quality department who grasp quality outcomes, and actively contribute to achieving them on-site. It might also mean educating team members on the importance of a well-documented quality management plan.
An organisation that operates with a proactive quality management plan is essential for achieving high-quality outcomes on every project. A well-documented and easily accessible quality management plan is crucial. This means that each project team understands how quality impacts their specific project. Being able to provide a clear roadmap to implement the organisation’s quality plan for any project, regardless of its size or value. Having the ability to welcome a new project manager who can seamlessly progress on a project without worrying about quality issues because everything is correctly set up, helps to foster a good relationship with stakeholders and ensures the delivery of positive outcomes.
Building a culture of Continuous improvement
Creating a culture of continuous Improvement is essential for optimising existing processes without having to reinvent the wheel. Handling inspections and audits in real-time instead of having incomplete ITPs and checklists. This means you can ensure that quality is maintained throughout the project life cycle, which drives efficiency. What does this really mean?
Let's break this down: optimise existing processes without reinventing the wheel. Quality showcases your expertise to the industry, making excellence a core part of your organisation's identity. You deliver exceptional work, supported by employees who fully grasp project requirements. Quality isn't just a buzzword; it's your promise to both current and future stakeholders that your projects stand the test of time. When we talk about optimising existing processes, we mean recognising the great work you're already doing and identifying where quality can seamlessly integrate.
How can I empower our teams to capture reliable evidence and ensure it is securely documented? How can I guide the team to thoroughly cover all bases, acknowledging that even the most diligent work can miss critical aspects due to job specifics or particular requirements. Empowering your teams to perform at their best fosters a culture of quality. This includes conducting real-time inspections instead of waiting for the team to complete ITPs and checklists post site-visit. Getting teams to understand exactly what data is being collected, why that data is important and how their physical roles of creating these structures is important. The impact helps to drive a culture of quality.
Once teams grasp the impact of their work, they not only understand the quality objectives but also become proactive in driving those outcomes. They can begin to take ownership, saying, "I want to implement this because I saw how effective it was in our last project." Initially, this might seem challenging, but as you continuously communicate the importance and engage the teams, it becomes clear that this isn't just another mundane quality module. It's a way to showcase the excellence of their work. This inclusive approach fosters a unified effort and makes it easier to achieve truly transformational quality outcomes.
The importance of cross-functional quality management
Cross-functional quality management revolves around dismantling silos within an organisation. This approach ensures that every team, whether on-site or in the office, adheres to unified quality standards. Digital tools play a crucial role in achieving these seamless outcomes. Let’s break what this looks like:
The first step is identifying and removing silos. These are often the invisible boundaries within your organisation where teams operate in isolation. For instance, management might be in one area, project teams in another, and site office teams only interacting among themselves. This separation can lead to in-stream decisions being made without broader input. Recognising these silos is vital, as it allows you to pinpoint and dismantle the barriers impeding effective collaboration.
What we’ve learnt working within the industry is that the most transformative impact comes from effectively connecting site and project teams. One proven approach is to ensure seamless integration of additional stakeholders—such as project teams, site crews, subcontractors, and architects—without any drop-off in communication or quality. Breaking down these silos is essential to align everyone with the team's quality standards. By leveraging robust quality standards, you can drive impactful on-site outcomes using digital tools. This strategy empowers your teams to gather high-quality data consistently. Reliable data collection on-site is crucial; it’s not just about taking photos or compiling files and attachments. It's about integrating all forms of data—specification documents, on-site visits, and more—into a comprehensive, cohesive system.
Recognising the essence of quality and integrating it into every interaction—whether with tools, processes, or external stakeholders—is crucial. A digital tool aligned with your organisational quality standards simplifies this for on-site teams, enabling them to capture reliable data as part of their daily tasks. This proactive alignment saves time and ensures consistent data capture, allowing you to monitor data in real-time.
Building stakeholder trust through effective communication
Connecting site and project teams creates a cohesive approach that enhances decision-making and boosts project efficiency. By empowering teams to make informed decisions at any given moment, you ensure that repetitive tasks lead to consistently better outcomes for your organisation.
One of the biggest benefits of a digital first approach to Quality Management is the ability to enhance communication. Working with clients has taught us that the client - customer interaction is the most important in any business transaction. Especially in the construction context whether it be public private partnership, a roading authority or state regional council or in the commercial space working with a large property developer.
Boosting your stakeholder's confidence, facilitating clear and effective communication, and conveying all this through efficient data capture will ensure that what you deliver stands out as a critical outcome.
The first step is to understand how we communicate and when we need to communicate. Sometimes it’s the things that seem obvious that might be missed - you’d be surprised at the number of times we’ve heard that the first time on-site is often the first time a quality management plan is communicated. A solid plan includes Site Offers being kept informed well before they step on site. Things like whole point requirements and proactive stakeholder confidence - not just on a specific project but across the board. For example, with state roading projects, there's an expectation set out by the Roading Authority on quality expectations. Integrating these stakeholder requirements into your organisation's quality management plan ensures that when team members refer to the plan for their specific project needs, those requirements are already embedded. This streamlines the process at the project level, reducing the need for additional thought and ensuring that your teams are content and efficient on-site.
When someone arrives on-site and you're equipped with a comprehensive communication strategy, it fosters satisfaction and allows you to concentrate on the task at hand. Establishing a single source of truth builds transparency, accelerating work sign-offs and reinforcing your relationship with stakeholders. This trust not only ensures successful project completion but also paves the way for repeat business.
Ensuring you get paid fairly by capturing the right information
The right digital tool can aggregate your data to give you an accurate status. Once you're in-stream during the project and communicating well with stakeholders at some point, it's likely you'll encounter a problem. On major projects we’ve found that in some cases there might be entire teams dedicated to spending a lot of time crunching data in Excel spreadsheets to communicate the project status and high impact areas. That data captured on-site should then aggregate up to produce metrics and insights that management and project management teams can use to communicate progress or cost. Having the ability to communicate that progress in-stream in a project is vital to delivering on-time and on-budget.
Ensuring you get paid fairly by capturing the right information
Capturing accurate information in real-time is essential to getting paid fairly and accelerating work approvals boosts stakeholder confidence. By implementing a proactive quality management plan and fostering a culture of quality across your organisation, you can streamline the approval process and expedite project sign-offs. This approach helps to build trust and ensures timely and fair payment for your efforts.
Timely payments offer several advantages, including the ability for organisations to efficiently manage resources, for both current projects and future endeavours. State and federal authorities continually update their project pipelines, releasing new tenders that companies have eagerly anticipated for years. Being paid on time enables organisations to confidently bid on these new opportunities, knowing they have the necessary resources available.
Proper financial management of ongoing projects ensures that companies are well-positioned to invest in upcoming ventures. Therefore, establishing a system that ensures fair and prompt payments is crucial for sustaining growth and readiness for future projects.
Utilising digital tools to capture and communicate accurate information accelerates milestone achievements, ensuring fair compensation for all parties involved. The importance of capturing correct evidence cannot be overstated. Managing an ITP in Excel alongside 500 photos in a Dropbox becomes cumbersome and costly. When you need to allocate personnel to sift through this data, it introduces additional expenses. Your team members are your greatest asset and also represent a significant cost. Engaging them in manual data crunching detracts from their core responsibilities, resulting in lost time and increased expenditures.
A digital tool that consolidates all essential data in one place streamlines the process significantly. This tool ensures you capture high-quality data, bolster stakeholder confidence, and gather the necessary information for accurate and timely payments. By the time you need to present this data, everything is already organised and readily accessible, making your workflow more efficient and effective.
For instance, minimising rework, reducing pushback, and lowering the likelihood of non-conformance are all tied back to an effective quality management plan. Understanding what quality truly means, understanding the right data to capture, and knowing the specifications and expectations of our customers means we ensure that the correct information is gathered through the appropriate channels. A faster handover ultimately signifies delivering a superior, higher-quality product with fewer obstacles. This not only delights stakeholders but also instil confidence in your processes—no need for them to double-check every detail because they trust your rigorous standards.
Reducing rework is integral to enabling a quicker and more accurate handover. This approach not only boosts cash flow but also diminishes disputes, ensuring everyone is aligned. While the term "disputes" can be daunting, it’s an essential part of the conversation. Often, dispute resolutions extend well beyond the project’s completion and can be among the most challenging and costly issues to resolve. Anything we can do to minimise disputes is crucial for facilitating a smoother handover and ensuring fair payment. High-quality reports not only fulfill contractual obligations but also impress clients with standardised templates, leading to positive outcomes and repeat business.
So let’s break that down ;
For instance, imagine we have established a robust quality management plan that has resulted in strong stakeholder confidence. Everyone is aligned and prepared to receive quality assurance documentation to facilitate progress claims. However, this critical information arrives scattered across six different documents, in five varying formats, and requires logging into three separate platforms, creating a chaotic and confusing scenario. This disorganisation inevitably frustrates customers, as they spend hours sifting through the documentation, unsure of where to find specific information. We recognise that high-quality standards naturally involve extensive documentation, but the lack of a streamlined system exacerbates inefficiencies.
Future-proofing our processes and ensuring strong evidence is crucial. That's why your reporting solution must handle the necessary bulk of data effectively. While comprehensive evidence is essential, the ability to distil this information through a standardised template is key. A standardised template ensures that the information you capture consistently follows the same format, location, flow, and expected outcome. Implementing this template can be achieved either during initial interactions with your customer or by introducing it early on, perhaps through a demo. If you have an ongoing relationship with a client, they are likely already familiar with and appreciative of your streamlined reporting. This consistency builds customer confidence and ensures you receive fair and prompt payment through a more efficient handover process.
What our customers say
“We've established a level of transparency that enhances trust with our client.”
“We use to have thousands of sheets of paper for every job. Now we have all the information in one place."
“These regularly updated records of QA means there are better lines of communication among all parties which helps to build trust, mitigate any long term issues or mistakes and saves everyone money in the long term."
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