Quality assurance is the process-oriented side of a construction project’s quality program, the planning, procedures, and preventive measures established before and during work to reduce the likelihood of defects occurring in the first place, as distinct from quality control’s inspection-based catching of defects after the fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A strong quality assurance program typically starts well before any work begins on a given piece of the building. Pre-installation meetings for specific trade work, where the sub, the inspector, and relevant design team members walk through installation requirements together before the crew starts, are a classic QA measure; the goal is to align everyone’s understanding of the standard before work happens, rather than only discovering a misunderstanding once inspection reveals a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Submittal review functions as a quality assurance activity too, even though it’s not usually filed under that label explicitly. Confirming the right material, from the right manufacturer, meeting the right performance criteria, before it’s ordered and installed, is preventing a defect before it happens, which is precisely what QA is meant to do, distinguishing it from the QC inspection that would otherwise be the first point of catching the same problem, but much later and at much higher cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A useful way to evaluate whether a project’s quality assurance measures are actually working: are quality control inspections finding fewer defects over time as the project progresses, or is the same category of problem recurring repeatedly despite supposedly preventive measures being in place? A QA program that isn’t actually reducing the rate of defects caught downstream isn’t functioning as intended, regardless of how thorough it looks on paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A practical way to strengthen QA on any project without a large budget increase: building a short, project-specific pre-installation checklist for the trades most prone to recurring issues on past similar work, rather than relying purely on generic industry standards that don’t reflect this specific project’s particular risk areas. A checklist informed by actual experience with a given assembly type tends to catch more relevant issues than a generic template pulled from a standard reference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Training and communication of quality expectations to field crews, not just to supervisory staff, is a QA measure that’s easy to underweight relative to formal documentation and meetings. A crew that understands why a particular standard is required is more likely to accurately implement that standard as compared to a crew that is just told to follow a given rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Quality assurance is the process-oriented side of a construction project’s quality program, the planning, procedures, and preventive measures established before and during work to reduce the likelihood of defects occurring in the first place, as distinct from quality control’s inspection-based catching of defects after the fact. A strong quality assurance program typically starts well before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-q"],"yoast_head":"\n