Common challenges in construction quality control
- Quality
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By Gerry Sharpe
- Aug 21, 2024
Quality control – it’s the foundation of any construction project’s success, impacting every phase of the build.
It goes hand in hand with cost control, safety improvements, and better project outcomes. Unfortunately, construction quality control comes with many challenges. Let’s explore those challenges and how you can overcome them in your organisation.
It’s no secret that there’s a lack of skilled trade workers right now, which presents many problems in the industry. You can’t have quality without qualified labour.
This means more than having a team of trained professionals; you must assign the right workers to the right tasks and ensure your site supervisors clearly understand the project’s quality expectations.
Give your Chargehands the authority to train and manage contractors and subs in a way that encourages them to adhere to those quality expectations.
Before you even begin breaking ground, ensure the entire team understands the quality requirements—holding a preconstruction meeting to discuss the project not only comes with safety benefits, but it’s also the best time to lay some ground rules; for example, that you won’t tolerate or accept poor quality.
Set high quality standards from the start, provide the necessary training before beginning work, and encourage each person to take pride in their tasks.
“ Setting Standards above compliance is the way forwards, Be done with hearing it's within tolerance! ”
Inconsistent communication between stakeholders
There’s no better pair than quality control and communication. If you don’t have a consistent, effective way for stakeholders to communicate about compliance, expectations, policy, and safety, quality control becomes an endless process.
Not to mention the cost pressures that can result from miscommunication regarding variations from the approved design.
You need to make quality control part of every discussion about project expectations and involve everyone from project managers to subs to ensure everyone knows what you expect from them.
Determine how frequent communications should be, what must be communicated, and how everyone involved will keep in touch—like with a digital communication platform.
You can use construction communication software to connect everyone and ensure better quality control processes with real-time collaboration that reduces mistakes and misunderstandings.
Inadequate documentation
Poor document management is a massive detriment to a project’s quality, leading to defects, delays, rework, and overruns. In fact, inadequate documentation costs construction companies tens of millions annually in UK Construction.
Other than wasted labour time and communication delays, one way that poor documentation practices affect quality control on construction is by slowing down responses to variations from the approved design.
Almost every project will have various variations from the approved design during design and building—there’s no efficient way to keep up with all of those requests with manual processes. Even a short delay can lead to significant quality issues, rework, and waste.
To combat this, you want your documentation practices to:.
- Ensure each document is easily searchable
- Store documents in a way that’s accessible to every stakeholder
- Include everything (designs, contracts, RFIs, snag lists, etc.)
Create a site inspection plan to check if it meets the project’s quality acceptance standards. Put someone in charge of this inspection plan and hold them accountable.
Gerry Sharpe, FACQP
Setting standards above compliance - Always - No one has ever won a contract by saying we're going to work to the bare minimum on Quality!
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