The quest for perfection

by Katie Daniel | September 20, 2017 10:54 am

SPECIFICATIONS
By Alan L. Atkinson, CSI, CCS, AIA
You can call it quality assurance (QA), quality control (QC), or quality management—in my view, the process is the same, requiring planning, monitoring, and management. CSI’s Project Delivery Practice Guide defines QA and QC as separate entities, with the former addressing the establishment of processes to help ensure quality is built into the project and the latter being the process of checking to confirm the desired level of quality in the final product. (Both terms are used for both design and construction processes in the Practice Guide.)

However, this author has always personally felt the word ‘assurance’ was too close to ‘insurance’ or ‘ensurance,’ implying a guarantee the documents are free of defects. In my experience and opinion, this is impossible to achieve (despite this article’s title). I tend to prefer the use of the term ‘quality control,’ which will be the terminology employed for this article.

I received my first lesson in quality control during my first job out of college. For my first project, my supervisor asked me to select exterior colors for an office addition to a paper factory. I thought this was going to be pretty easy, since the company colors were canary yellow, poppy red, and royal blue. I marked up a print of the exterior elevations with the three colors, coordinating with those previously selected for the paper factory itself.

Then, I sat down with my supervisor to review my efforts. Things went along fine until we got to my selection of poppy red for the pair of entry doors. He started chuckling, “But those are Herculite doors!”

I had no idea what Herculite doors were, and had not thought to look at the door schedule. When I asked him why that mattered, he explained, “They are ¾-inch thick frameless glass—I don’t think we want to paint them poppy red!”

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Introduction to quality control
I think of ‘quality control’ as the process by which a company:

• establishes the level of quality desired in the product it produces;
• provides the framework for employees to achieve that level of quality;
• measures the level of quality on a regular basis; and
• makes adjustments in the process to strive for continued improvement.

This concept becomes a bit more difficult when you apply it to design professionals—architects and engineers have more than one product. We provide a service to our clients, we produce documents by which the bricks and mortar are laid, and we help produce the end product: the buildings in which people live, learn, play, worship, and work.

Controlling quality is important for both obvious reasons like creating consistent, coordinated, and complete CDs to obtain bids within a narrow range and limiting change orders and liability, as well as less-obvious ones like providing professional development opportunities to current colleagues and attracting new staff members.

This article is focused on the construction documents (CDs) product, but I hope it is obvious the quality of service to clients and the quality of the final building are inextricably tied to the quality of the CDs.

Critical areas for consistency in construction documents
Important areas for quality in construction documents include both production standards and coordination. The former encompasses the written rules and guidelines governing:

• what is shown in your CDs;
• how the information looks; and
• how it is organized.

Production standards are important because they are the basis for consistent CDs, regardless of who in your firm (or outside it, in the case of outsourced production) creates them.

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I had the opportunity to lead the updating of Callison Architecture’s production standards in the early 1980s in Seattle. I was also on the Honolulu Chapter of the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA’s) Production Office Procedures (POPs) committee to update standards in 1987, and led the updating of Architects Hawaii Ltd.’s (AHL) production manual in the early 1990s. My research during these updates reinforced my belief in the importance of consistent CDs.

There are several production standards your firm can use as a basis for creating your own, including the U.S. National CAD Standards (NCS). In some cases, your client may require you to follow its standard. Either way, the advantages of consistency can be seen with the following examples.

Always dimensioning to the same side of a wall or partition limits the possibility of misaligned walls.
This can be especially true of concrete masonry unit (CMU) walls, where nominal dimensions are usually used, but the 9.5-mm (3⁄8-in.) difference (or 19 mm [3⁄4 in.] if two walls are included) can be significant for elements such as elevator shafts and stair shafts using manufactured steel stairs.

Always using the correct terminology for construction materials limits the possibility of contractor misinterpretations and potential change orders.
This terminology aspect became even more evident as I began writing specifications for AHL in the late 1980s, and then doing the office portion of contract administration (CA) on projects. There are industry-standard terms for construction materials and assemblies that should be employed to avoid discrepancies. When you use a term to describe something on the drawings, the same term should be used in the specification.

Always using the same abbreviations for construction materials and terms helps avoid discrepancies.
You may want to consider incorporating your subconsultants’ abbreviation lists with yours. If not, you should at least check their lists to ensure they are complete for their work. (Undoubtedly, there will be some duplication of your abbreviations on their lists, but with different meanings.)

Always using generic material terminology on the drawings allows you to schedule which material should be used in which condition in the specifications.
Employing nonproprietary terminology can be advantageous for this reason. An example is “sheet metal flashing”—if more than one kind of sheet metal is used, it is usually easier and clearer to schedule their individual locations in the specification, rather than calling out the kind of material on the drawings. It is also much easier to change a material in one location by an addendum to the specifications, rather than trying to catch all the locations where it is noted on the drawings.

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Managing coordination
Coordination, or discrepancies due to lack thereof, is the most difficult quality element to manage. Every time you think you have checked all the things that could go wrong, something new occurs.

The first level of coordination involves the usual standard coordination exercises. These include confirming:

• electrical has provided the correct power characteristics for mechanical equipment;
• structural has provided supports for mechanical and electrical equipment loads;
• mechanical has taken into consideration the heat load from electrical equipment;
• electrical has provided a power source for landscape irrigation controllers and fire alarm control panels; and
• civil or mechanical has provided a water supply stub for landscape irrigation.

The second level of coordination involves items such as confirming civil pipe sizes and locations for water, sewer, and drainage going into the building match those shown by mechanical and plumbing coming out of the building. Sometimes, coordination appears to be more along the lines of wishful thinking, when one consultant includes a “See XYZ” on the drawing, and nothing is shown on the consultant’s XYZ drawings when you go to find them. Anytime I see “See Specs” or any other reference, I always check first to see there is actually information there, and then whether it matches or coordinates with the reference document.

The next level of coordination is a combination of coordination, constructability, and usability. These items are difficult to catch prior to construction, but effort should be made to think about how we design buildings to prevent these coordination issues.

In one concrete high-rise residential condo project, the entry to a U-shaped kitchen was an opening through a concrete shear wall, with the refrigerator/freezer located on the opposite side. During construction, the width of the kitchen was slightly reduced to accommodate plumbing. When the appliances were installed in the lowest-floor unit (floors were still being poured above), it was discovered the refrigerator was 927 mm (36 ½ in.) wide, but the kitchen opening was only 914 mm (36 in.) wide. So the contractor turned the refrigerator sideways and pushed it into the kitchen. However, when he tried to turn it to move into place, the distance between the countertops was less than the diagonal dimension of the refrigerator. The contractor ended up having to widen the kitchen opening by chipping concrete for a large number of units. He also discovered because the refrigerator doors would only open just past 90 degrees, and because of the shelves on both the refrigerator and freezer doors, it was almost impossible to remove the drawers for cleaning.

In a hospital renovation project, a large air-handler was located above the ceiling in a 2.44-m (8-ft) wide corridor. Both corridor walls were fire-rated and had to extend to the floor above. The ceiling design was a 0.61-m (2-ft) square grid, and almost every single ceiling panel was fixed, because of registers, downlights, fire sprinkler heads, speakers, or strobe lights. To access the air-handler for service, a fire-rated access door needed to be added through the corridor wall above the ceiling in a room adjacent to the corridor.

In this same project, the new first-floor emergency room was being installed in a former administrative area that was part of the oldest wing of the hospital. We coordinated the removal and relocation of all utilities shown on the original mechanical/electrical/plumbing (MEP) drawings, including renovation drawings. When the contractor was demolishing the existing partitions, he discovered a 9.5-mm (8-in.) cast-iron roof drain located right in the middle of the new 2.44-m (8-ft) wide corridor.

Fortunately, the floor-to-floor height to the second floor was tall, and the contractor was able to transition over to miss the corridor. Unfortunately, he could not move the line in the basement operating room. He had to remove the recessed operating room light fixture, and have the plumber (who luckily had a slight build) crawl on the plaster ceiling framing after operating room hours to install the transition back to the original pipe. We discovered it was common practice at the time this wing was designed for the architectural, not the mechanical, to show all roof drainage lines. When we reviewed the original architectural drawing, we found the roof drain.

Organizing and managing quality in your firm
The ideal results of a successful quality program should be to have the quality built in by your team, including your subconsultants. The goal is to have the review completed with adequate time to make corrections. You should strive to achieve a commitment by your staff and subconsultants that quality is everyone’s responsibility.

I firmly believe success is enhanced by having a ‘quality champion’ in your firm. That person may be responsible for designing the program and implementing it, or the designated quality manager actually performing document reviews. There are several factors affecting your decision on program organization. If your principals manage their own projects, and they have distinctly different project types and clientele, and you do not have a staff person with the experience or inclination to be a quality manager, then you should establish the requirements and quality expectations, and enforce consistent quality among the principals.

However, if there is a staff person with the experience and inclination to be the quality manager, and the principals are willing to accept this second-party review of their projects for the sake of improving quality consistently firm-wide, the program should be organized along these lines. Another alternative is to use a third-party reviewer.

A quality program should be based on a set of production standards. All of the production standards I have worked with were adapted from what was then the Northern California AIA Chapter’s Recommended Standards on Production Office Procedures created in the early 1970s. If your firm does not have its own standards, I recommend you adopt or adapt the nationally recognized NCS as your own. (If you do not agree with portions for your practice, you can always modify them.)

Once you have adopted a set of standards, you should disseminate them to your staff for everyone to follow. You should also hold training sessions with newly hired staff. Undoubtedly, there will be disagreements over certain aspects of the adopted standards. For example, I believe it is important to give the contractor some dimensional flexibility during construction by leaving open
a secondary or tertiary string of plan dimensions. You should leave out an unimportant dimension from the standpoint of design or room function. At my former firm, there was one person who argued strongly to close all dimension strings. He had encountered a situation in construction that supported his opinion.

You also need to devise a way of measuring your quality level, and to establish a goal for all projects, firm-wide. At a previous firm at which I worked, the chief contract administrator kept track of project change orders by source. With the information segregated in a spreadsheet, he was able to tally the total cost of all changes by their sources at the end of a construction project, thereby measuring the quality of the CDs. The source categories he used were:

• Owner-initiated;
• Found or unforeseen conditions (common with renovation and weather delays);
• Code-required;
• A/E-initiated;
• Omissions;
• Errors; and
• Other.

The guideline the firm used was if the total change cost of A/E-initiated, Omissions, and Errors was one percent or less of the original construction cost, then we had produced a ‘good’ set of CDs. If that combination exceeded two percent, we considered the set to be ‘inadequate.’ These three categories are controllable by the architect/engineer. As a start, I suggest you could analyze a number of your recent projects to measure how well you have done against this guideline. You could then determine, based on your practice and your experience (and the number of return clients), whether you want to adjust this goal.

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Management tools
Some management tools can assist you in your quest for perfection.

Checklists
One method for starting your own quality-control checklist is to document the items that have been problematic for your firm, organize the list, and use it to check current and future projects. We did this at my former firm, with my “Quality Control Coordination List” as a start. The chief contract administrator added the items he had accumulated over the years, organized the combined list, and put it into a spreadsheet separated by discipline. We were then able to disseminate the subconsultants’ lists on projects, so they understood what we expected of them to avoid repeating past challenges.

There are numerous problems with using checklists as the primary quality management tool. If the checklists are not comprehensive enough, items will be missed. If they are too comprehensive, your colleagues may just roll their eyes and check everything as ‘OK,’ without actually looking. The checklists may also include items meaningful to the author, but unintelligible to anyone else. They may also cause the person performing the document review to look only
at the checklist, and consequently miss items.

I use checklists after I have completed my detailed review of the documents. I have to perform an additional partial review of the documents, but I find this method frees my powers of observation during the original review.

Insurance carriers
One’s professional liability insurance carrier is also a good source for recommendations, based on its knowledge of issues causing lawsuits and losses for its clients (i.e. you). As a little additional incentive, efforts to formalize a quality control program can, in some cases, earn a discount on next year’s liability insurance premium.

Real-life experiences
It can be beneficial to lead your project production team, including subconsultants if appropriate, on a ‘lessons learned’ walkthrough of the construction in progress. You should discuss things that worked, as well as things that could have worked better. On-the-job training in contract administration for a project they helped produce can be a mutually beneficial professional development opportunity for staff and management. Also beneficial are presentations at brown-bag lunches in your office, with photos or videos.

AIA and CSI resources
Other tools for quality control management can include AIA D200, Project Checklist, and the association’s Best Practices, specifically Chapter 12 (“Quality Management”), which includes:

• “Less rework equals more productivity and quality” (12.01);
• “When more is less: Why do we draw so many sheets?” (12.01);
• “Risky business: Managing the top 5 risks” (12.01);
• “Keeping tabs: Using document audits/peer reviews” (12.01);
• “Managing quality in the design development phase” (12.03); and
• “Schematic design phase quality management” (12.03).

The Spring 2008 edition[5] of AIA Practice Management Digest also includes some excellent papers on quality management, including one on ISO 9001.

As mentioned, quality is also discussed in CSI Project Delivery Practice Guide, Section 8.9 (“[Design] Quality Assurance/Quality Control Requirements”).

The ideal quality manager
Certain attributes are important for a quality manager, but experience in production is among the most critical. To gain the respect of the project team, they must believe the person reviewing the documents knows what they are talking about. They also need to have a thorough knowledge of your production standards to enforce them.

Quality managers also need experience in writing specifications. To be a good specifier, you often have to know the right questions to ask the project architect, or even make some of the required decisions yourself. Specifications are the contract administrator’s field manual, and CA experience is where the rubber meets the road, and where all the hopes and dreams of the designer meet the practical limitations of the contractor.

The ideal quality  manager has a tendency to be detail-oriented—this is not a role for someone who is going to gloss over small mistakes. (Ultimately, it should be the project team’s responsibility to decide which items get corrected, based on the magnitude of the item and the timeframe to make the corrections.) He or she also requires a sense of ‘design appropriateness.’ Although it is not my job to be a design critic, there have been times when I asked the team if they really knew how something was going to look.

How do I work?
When I review a set of documents, I review the architectural in detail, the civil fairly thoroughly, and the structural, MEP, and landscape for mainly coordination items. Everything I review, I check off with a yellow marker; items I comment on receive a red marker. When there is reference to a detail, I go to that sheet/detail and yellow-mark the number after reviewing the detail. When I have finished reviewing a set, all unmarked detail references need to be cross-referenced.

I begin at the cover sheet and ‘read’ the set like a newspaper to the last page. Where there are references to the specifications, I follow that reference and confirm the coordination. I do the same with all references to another discipline. I check the Drawing Index against the actual sheet titles to ensure they match, and I do the same with the Specification Table of Contents. My goal is to mentally build the building.

When my review has been completed, I meet with the architectural project team and go through the entire red-marked set. I believe it is important to debrief the entire team (at least the architectural team) to gain the most from this educational opportunity. Frequently, some team members are unaware how their work affects the rest of the CDs. The team is responsible for copying and distributing the subconsultants’ red-marked sets to them. If I do a subsequent review on the same project, I request the previous mark-up back to back-check the corrections and provide a base for the next review.

About two years ago, I began using software to review the documents and summarize my comments. The program provides many tools allowing great markup flexibility, and the comments are easily summarized. Both the marked-up drawings and specifications are in pdf format, and the comment list is hot-linked to the drawings. This feature allows rapid access to locate the comment on the drawing. The program also allows for many windows, so I can start with the site plan sheet, window in the floor plan sheet, then the door schedule sheet, and then the door details sheet. The particular software program provider I chose also allows users to create a digital copy of the review set by simply renaming it, speeding up the process of distributing comments to subconsultants.

Conclusion
A quality control program for construction documents takes some planning, effort, and dedication. Time must be allocated for this task in the project schedule, and money must be budgeted for staff or third-party reviews. All other aspects of quality should be positive—for the client, the contractor, the project, and the members of the design team.

The opinions expressed in Specifications are based on the author’s experiences and do not necessarily reflect those of The Construction Specifier or CSI.

Alan L. Atkinson, CSI, CCS, AIA, is a registered architect in Hawaii and Washington. He is a Member Emeritus of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and a member of CSI’s Honolulu Chapter. After retiring as a senior associate with Architects Hawai’i Ltd., he started his own firm, Atkinson Quality Control, and has been in business for the last seven years. He has more than 50 years of experience in all phases of architecture, with a special emphasis in quality control. Atkinson is experienced in construction administration, project management, and the preparation and coordination of construction drawings and specifications. He has written specifications and performed quality control reviews for a variety of residential, commercial, hotel, medical, industrial, and institutional projects. Atkinson can be reached via e-mail at atkinsonalan@hawaiiantel.net[6].

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