Putting quality at the forefront

Skills development, construction rehearsals, and ‘pressing pause’ are among the strategies employed by McLaren to ensure quality on the Sizewell campus construction project, campus director Leigh Greenway told GIRI members at the recent members’ meeting.

McLaren Construction is partnering with Sizewell to deliver the campus construction for the Sizewell C nuclear power station. Covering 19 hectares, the campus will provide 2,400 living units as well as an amenity building. “We’ve been looking at how we manage error and what we can do to prevent ending up with 2,400 problems,” said Leigh, as he discussed the project’s quality strategy.

Historically, he said, cost and time have been the priority in the industry but there is now a recognition that this culture costs more money in the long run. “However, while the industry has introduced quality managers and quality management systems, what we haven’t done is bring everyone else up to the same place. And at McLaren, we recognise that this process won’t be organic and can only be achieved through training and skills development. 

“That’s what we’re doing at McLaren and Sizewell, and we are using the same language as we used for health and safety – behaviour, culture, competencies, skills training, etc – so that there is a consistency of approach in how we apply this to quality management and error reduction.”

The first step, he explained, is identifying the skills requirements. McLaren has set up a development hub that carries out competency appraisals – 187 questions across 19 subject bases covering the whole remit of the job. “Off the back of this, we want to make the training and skills development focused on the individual, because otherwise you have people who are switched off, or more worried about what else they have to do, rather than focusing on what we want them to learn. We also need to make training relevant to their jobs at that time.”

Pressing pause

Similar to GIRI’s concept ‘press pause to avoid error’, Leigh explained that McLaren has instigated a system of ‘pause, think, review, act’. “We’ve just gone through the first issue of the stage three design for the campus and we’ve taken a pause, carried out a detailed review of the information and had a think about why we want this information, whether it works for us, and whether we can build and procure it. Once we’ve done all of that and we’ve given our comments back to the design team, then we can act on it.”

However, he made the point that to do this, it is necessary to develop the skills to understand the impact of the design. Giving an example from a previous job where errors with a steelwork detail led to a five-week delay and significant knock-on programme impact, Leigh argued that what’s required is a combination of competence, performance, and learning. “This is what we are trying to apply now through ‘pause, think, review, act’ to ensure that this process gives us what we require when we require it.”

Getting it right ahead of time

He explained that the strategy at Sizewell is to develop these skills through modelling. “We’ve taken one of the living units and the PUC cupboard that sits between each pair of units ‒ what would be the utility cupboard in a standard residential building ‒ and we built and rebuilt them virtually until we thought we had them right. But when took them to site, while the living unit went really well. we discovered that the PUC cupboard didn’t fit, despite building the model several times over.”

The PUC cupboard has just been rebuilt for the third time, this time successfully. “We now understand the process, and we are plugging this back into the design team so they can redetail it to incorporate the changes. This means we can be confident that when we pass this into the procurement stream and start looking for the offsite manufacture, that it will work the 1,200 times we need it to, and that all the tolerances and connections will be 100% correct every time.”

In a similar vein, there are plans for the creation of a ‘show-me’ warehouse, which will take all the standard details and create benchmarking mock ups. “The idea is to film or photograph the process of creating these so that when we get to inducting the various trades, we can show them how these details go together and what good looks like. That way they understand what we are looking for.” 

Skills development

Part of bringing everyone up to the required quality standard involves training and skills development. This includes GIRI training, and Leigh explained that McLaren recently put 32 people through part one of GIRI’s training across interfaces course, with part two planned for October.

“We also plan to develop a college for everyone from school leavers to experienced operatives to make sure they are up with the latest skills and understand what we are looking for – and why quality is critical in a nuclear power station. There will be other training facilities in the various offices around the site for everyone from machine drivers to technicians and even some of my own team.”

Other strategies McLaren intends to implement on the project include senior management quality walkarounds and quality stand-downs. “Just as we did with safety, we are bringing quality to the forefront.”

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