A Preliminary Study On The Quality Management Audit System For The Construction Projects

The quality management is an important researching subject in construction projectmanagement, the Chinese government introduced a number of project quality managementlaws, regulations and policies to solve this problem, and also a series of quality standards arepromoted by the government, many of the quality requirements are enforced in the projectimplementation, which has played a positive role in the promotion of the project qualityimprovement. But these laws and regulations are the only construction project qualitymanagement standards, which put emphasis on the result of quality control, without fullyconsidering the quality process and quality management system, are not so sufficient to forma systematic quality management system. Meanwhile, operating efficiency is the one aspectthat must be considered by the construction companies or real estate developers, so the qualitycosts and other relevant factors which affect the quality of project also should be considered.This research has chosen a public construction project as a study case, by analyzing thecomposition of quality management system, and generalizing the construction quality processfrom management process flow, a quality process audit system is then built for constructionquality process control in this research, which has provided theoretical basis for constructionquality self audit and contractor potential analysis for construction enterprises. The mainresults of the paper included:(1)The relationships between the sub-goals of the construction project management areanalyzed using system dynamics methodology, and a mutual influence model is established todescribe the relationships between quality, schedule and cost. Using the concept of systemsarchetypes, and the analysis results of the model have shown that the quality solution loop isthe adjustment loop which is isolated from the feedback loop of the whole system, so that aquality control standard is firstly required to achieve a systematic stable control on threeobjectives.(2)The constitution of the construction quality management system is established todescribe relationships between quality management system, quality process assessmentsystem, and construction quality control system. The construction quality management systemis broken down into three parts, including quality management system assessment,construction quality process assessment and construction quality control assessment, and theimportance of quality process assessment is highlighted.(3)The construction management process flow is summarized base on the constructionlaws and regulations. The process flow is described from the aspects of construction decision making, project bidding, project performance, and completion acceptance. From the wholeprocess, it is specified that the government supervision departments are involved in the wholeprocess of the project, the inspection and approval procedures are cumbersome and in lowefficiency. So establishment of a standardized and unified quality management system is thenproposed to simplify the government supervision.(4) Based on the idea of “project owner to project owner, the “process model” forconstruction management is built to explain the project management. Compared to the“project model”, the “process model” is very different, which is aimed to establish long-termobjectives. It is the theoretical basis of transferring the result control of construction qualitymanagement to whole process quality control, where both quality results and qualityprocesses are emphasized.(5)A construction quality process assessment system (CQPAS) is established for qualitycapability audit based on the theology of benchmarking, and the “turtle model” which is usedto identify risks in process is applied to define the detailed assessment questions and auditpoints. Two independent assessment systems are established based on the CQPAS(construction quality process assessment system) including the self-audit system andcontractor potential analysis model. The evaluation aspects included in CQPAS are projectmanagement, project survey and design, construction preparation, construction performance,and owner satisfaction. A public construction work in Guangzhou is chosen as the study-case,and the implementation strategy and the grading of assessment result policy is also developed,the implementation of the study case has testified the applicability of the audit system.The establishment and implementation of CQPAS provides a theoretical basis for theproject owners to reinforce the quality supervision, as well as to establish a long-term qualitytarget and make continuous quality improvement. Meanwhile, the CQPAS can help theparticipations of the project, even the whole construction industry, to establish a unifiedconstruction quality management system and quality assessment standard, which is animprovement of standardization and effectiveness for quality management.