Back to basics to drive quality improvements

Now is the time to use quality as a strategic tool for change, said Richard Davis, GIRI board member and director at Kier Regional Building at the members’ meeting in September. “Post-Grenfell, we must use the levers we have to drive for a much better outcome and not let history repeat itself.”

Quality as a tool for change

Quality has been used to drive change in the past, said Richard, as he highlighted some of the discussions around this issue that he has been involved in as part of the CQI council. “The Japanese post WWII focused the entire basis of their economy on the quality of the products they produced. In the 1980s, the Thatcher government focused on quality after the UK was characterised as the ‘sick man of Europe’ and produced a competitiveness white paper that drove a lot of the economic thinking at the time.

“Now, countries in the Middle East have adopted EFQM business excellence models to improve public services on the huge scale. India and China have invested in their own national quality and excellence programmes as they attempt to build a brand based on quality and innovation and not cheap production. But at some point in our industry, the focus on quality got diluted.”  

Richard suggested that the proliferation of design and build has played a role in this dilution, as it allows for the absolution of responsibility across the professional team and supply chain. “Additionally, the shift from BS5750 to ISO9001 has resulted in a focus on the process rather than on the widgets we are producing.”

While organisations such as the CQI and the British Quality Foundation are active in this area – and GIRI itself is engaging with government and is recognised as a tool to improve the efficiency of the British construction industry – he argued that such successes and initiatives are the exception rather than the norm.

Getting quality to the forefront

“So the question is: how do we establish quality as a strategic tool in a modern world full of so many moving parts? We need that top level of management engagement, but how do we get people with quality qualifications to sit on top tables and how do we get customers to demand better quality and to put this higher on their set of requirements?”

Richard said his own quality journey started with a customer. “Four years ago, our biggest customer came to us and all the contractors on its framework and said they had a problem with quality and safety on all their projects, and that they needed to demonstrate improvement. We responded and put together a programme that went back to the basics of good quality control and focused on the widgets and how they performed. We launched this as a ‘quality reset’, acknowledging the industry's issues with quality.”

Richard went back to BS5750 and the ‘plan, do, check, act’ process deployed in the 1990s and found it still relevant today. “The inspection and test plan (ITP) process is the core of what we need to be doing, but after speaking to our workforce, and in my wider conversations as a GIRI board member, I have discovered that in many cases, people don’t understand ITPs. They want to go straight to the check list and miss out the plan and the learning that goes with it. So we recognised that we had a mountain to climb to get all the workforce to the same place.”

Kier followed its reset with a five-year strategy, ‘pride in quality’, which has a focus on ITPs, looking for the best examples and how the process can be modernised for the digital world. The strategy also involves finding the right language and tools to communicate with Gen Z and Millennials to ensure the message is understood. “Do we need more video, for example? And we are making use of electronic tools such as Procore, which has been huge for us.”

The time is now

Richard concluded by discussing the changes that have come in the wake of the Grenfell inquiry. “Dame Judith Hackitt has said that fixing the industry is about better quality and control, and all the controls, processes and governances we are putting in place come out of the Building Safety Act. It makes quality a legal requirement. As GIRI members, we are all striving to see quality at the same level on the agenda as safety and now is the moment to do that because quality is being legislated. The time to act is now.”

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