5 Ways to Maintain Quality Control Throughout Your Construction Project
This article covers:
Maximize Project Productivity and Profitability
While no two construction projects are the same, they all require significant resources, time, and money. The success of your construction project hinges on the quality of the outcome, compliance, and your team’s well-being.
Quality control sets the foundation for a construction project’s success. Efficient quality control procedures ensure that your project is built according to the required specifications and standards, guaranteeing everything runs smoothly from start to finish. This includes the quality of materials and workmanship, worksite safety, budgets, timelines, and project efficiency.
Poor quality control in construction management directly impacts project outcomes, leading to many problems. These can include cost overruns, defects, and safety risks. It can even cost your construction company its reputation.
To ensure the best outcomes, you must maintain effective quality control measures throughout a project’s life cycle, from initiation to final inspections.
What Is Quality Control in Construction?
Quality control is a system of maintaining the standards and specifications of a construction project. It ensures the final building will stand the test of time, is built to code, and meets the client’s expectations.
Quality control in construction management encompasses two categories: quality compliance and quality assurance. The former ensures a project meets current regulatory and legal requirements.
Quality compliance starts at a project’s planning and design phases and continues until the build is complete.
Discover five actionable tips for maintaining quality control throughout your construction project.
5 Ways to Maintain Construction Quality Control
1. Set Clear Quality Standards and Specifications
The first step to ensuring quality control is getting your team on the same page. Everyone, including the project manager, subcontractors, crews, and superintendents, must know what does and doesn’t qualify as sufficient results. When all team members share a common goal, they’re more likely to achieve it the first time.
Some quality control standards and specifications to consider include:
- Quality standards of specific projects
- Code standard compliance
- No visible defects
You must clearly articulate what is and is not acceptable criteria to ensure all employees meet your expectations.
2. Implement Robust Inspection and Testing Procedures
Don’t reserve inspections for the end of a project: conduct them regularly. Before performing site inspections, you should build a plan that includes what needs inspecting and what acceptable results look like. Your plan should also outline when and who will complete inspections.
Completed work should meet your construction firm’s expectations, a client’s criteria, and compliance codes.
3. Develop a Comprehensive Quality Control Checklist
One of the biggest challenges facing quality control in construction management is teamwide communication. A detailed quality control checklist helps employees and subcontractors stay on track. It also streamlines processes, assists in catching and preventing quality mistakes, enhances communication, and improves safety.
Your quality control checklist should be as detailed as possible. If your list includes unclear statements like “The XYZ looks good,” it can lead to more inconsistencies and misinterpretations.
Construction firms should organize their checklists by tasks and priorities. They should also add scheduled inspections to the checklist. This provides a record of who inspected what and when.
Quality control checklists should also evaluate work quality based on a client’s reviews and specific metrics, including client satisfaction, costs, and safety incidents.
Some questions to ask yourself when creating your checklist include:
- What scope and areas need to be inspected?
- Is the work complete?
- Does it meet the client’s standards and specifications?
- Has the work been inspected? If so, who will do so and when?
Share the checklist with your team before the project gets underway. It’s a crucial communication tool that allows workers to understand what is and isn’t permissible.
4. Foster a Positive and Collaborative Culture
Communication is an essential part of quality control. There must be efficient communication between all team members regarding project expectations, safety standards, compliance, and policy. Conversations and collaboration should happen early and often. Pre-task communications allow everyone to know your quality control standards before construction begins, while communication throughout the project ensures everyone understands how well the project is going and what areas need to be improved.
Construction project managers should pinpoint when conversations happen, the types of communication, and how messages are shared across the organization and with clients.
Using advanced construction project management technology to promote collaboration significantly improves construction management.
Linarc’s powerful collaboration software helps construction firms automatically document discussions. Team members can search for past discussions within the shared workspace to simplify decision reviews. They can add references for threaded discussions. Construction companies can also schedule quality control meetings and discussions on the shared project calendar.
5. Leverage Technology and Construction Project Management Software
Manual processes can hinder quality assurance. This is particularly true during a project’s inspection and construction stages. Complicated spreadsheets and time-consuming manual entries can be inefficient and inconvenient. They are also prone to errors.
Using construction project management software, like Linarc, significantly improves quality control. It does this by:
- Sharing designs, blueprints, schedules, and quality control standards and checklists with every employee and sub
- Scheduling and assigning quality control tasks to specific workers in real time and monitoring live updates
- Managing project financials and tracking estimates and revisions to minimize cost overruns
- Customizing project workflows
- Generating detailed status reports that include any potential quality problems to share with employees and clients
- Promoting collaboration by ensuring everyone has access to a common documentary repository shared across sub-contractors and field
Maintain Digital Quality Control in Construction with Linarc
Linarc gives construction firms the tools they need to optimize quality control procedures. Our intuitive and integrated construction management platform allows you to manage schedules, share documents in real time, streamline workflows, promote collaboration, and meet all quality requirements effortlessly.
Contact Linarc today to learn how our cutting-edge technology can improve your quality control procedures.
