In a professional design practice, there are 6 main management facets, discussed under the corresponding hexagonal links above right:
Practice, Client Relationships, Risk, Quality, Design, and Projects.
Quality Management
Quality Management (QM), like risk, is everywhere, all the time, an integral part of the design process, whether or not visibly present or acknowledged.
Indeed, in most design practices quality decisions are made almost unconsciously, as designers balance the varied and complex drivers for project execution. The myth that “QA is about paperwork” is simply wrong and confuses the issue needlessly.
A better way to think about QM is to appreciate that it is about being able to retain the decision-making process, and be able to refer back to it as the project moves through its various stages. Or, indeed, months or years later when the spector of risk rears its ugly head. In that context, QM is about decision-retrieval – NOT about useless paperwork.
A common error designers make when they read the international quality standard (ISO 9001) is to assume they need to keep “records of records”. If your primary records are in order, they are all the records any logical QM system needs.
QM has (in this DesignNode model) 4 main functions listed below (D01-D04). In addition, this section houses some related documents (D05-D08). Actually, there are more than 4 functions – there are 10 sections, 28 articles and 43 clauses in the international standard ISO 9001. However, these 4 that I’m highlighting are the ones you really need to think about if you are considering going down the ISO 9001 certification path.
D01 Quality Planning
D02 Leadership
D03 Project Quality Reviews
D04 Continual Improvement
D05 CHECKIT System
D06 MQIA Key Resources
D07 MQIA Papers
D08 Outstanding Examples of Quality
Quality planning is a requirement of ISO 9001, but it also makes just plain good sense. The standard requires the following planning actions:
I’ve abbreviated the requirements here, but that’s the gist of it. Although designers use different words to describe these actions, they already do most of them. What most don’t do is to make this planning explicit – it is typically more of an “oral culture” – always open to interpretation and consequential risk.
One of the problems is the unfamiliarity of the “Esperanto” of the quality standard, which many find hard to translate into the language of architecture and engineering. Relax! Help is at hand – see sidebar. Managing Quality in Architecture is your guide to successful implementation of ISO 9001.
Although published in 1996, prior to the release of the 2008 version of the standard, it is still relevant. This guide includes chapters from 22 authorities on QM in all aspects of the built environment.
Quality Leadership
The current version of ISO 9001 has expanded the leadership and commitment requirements for top management with a more detailed description of management’s responsibilities for quality, maintaining a client focus, and establishing, communicating and implementing a quality policy; but has removed the requirement to maintain records on these actions other than to document its quality policy.
Frankly, there is nothing onerous in any of it – it’s what you would expect of involved and conscientious firm leaders. All of these “requirements” could easily be translated into a checklist that leaders went through once a month – or once a quarter or even semi-annually – that might take perhaps 2 hours.
It is hard to get firm leaders to see the need to regularly review their firm’s quality performance, and even if they see the need, to actually make the time do it. Again – oral culture.
Project Quality Reviews
Project quality reviews are an important objective for design professionals. Every design professional I know does project reviews – they are SOP in our industry. Often, even typically, these reviews look at “quality” of the project in the broad context of that idea.
So, the mechanism is there. But where these reviews (or “crits” as architects call them) fall down in regard to ISO 9001 as (a) records of reviews are rarely kept, and designers tend to be a bit sloppy about comparing the design iteration to the client’s stated requirements.
ISO 9001 requires design & development planning, inputs, controls, outputs and changes. OK: I’ve summed up a couple of pages of the standard here. But once you get past the “Esperanto”, this is in fact exactly what we do. The one difference might be that the standard requires you to “retain documented information” on these actions.
Before you leap up to say, AHA! That’s what’s wrong with ISO 9001!, I’d like to ask: Are not your fee agreements, scopes of services, minutes of project control meetings, design submissions of various stages, and specifications, etc. “documented information” on these 5 steps? Of course they are! The normal records of any prudent practice that thinks about risk would satisfy all but the most persnickety of quality assessors.
NOTHING IN ISO 9001 REQUIRES YOU TO KEEP RECORDS OF RECORDS.
Continual Improvement
The no-brainer way to think about continual improvement is that every aspect of practice is subject to re-thinking, whenever it no longer operates the way it was intended.
To make this work in practice does require applying some brainpower, at all levels of the practice. That means that:
The CHECKIT System
CHECKIT is a simple, durable set of 26 one-page checklists, developed for the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1986, and today implemented directly or indirectly in most Australian architects’ QM systems. The original CHECKIT is available as a free download.
MQIA Key Resources & MQIA Papers
This site will, in due course, include biographical material on the many contributors to Managing Quality in Architecture, as well as the full version of their contributions (which were mostly shortened due to the publisher’s book length requirements.
Outstanding Examples of Quality
This site will include stories of projects, ancient and current, that for me define “quality”. They will be listed here as they get written.
Two Bridges in France: A very brief look at Lord Norman Foster’s amazing Millau Viaduct and the nearby, 2,000-year old Roman Pont du Gard.
Rethinking Quality Management
I don’t think this page needs a checklist. If you embrace the concept of “quality” at all, especially in today’s rapidly changing world, you really have to accept the idea that “quality” and “continual improvement” are synonymous. If you don’t buy that idea, farewell – you’re living in some other time; some other world. Good luck on your journey.
If you do buy that idea, then your only choice is implement a non-stop, never-ending attitude of rethinking everything about your practice that has to do with “quality” – however you choose to define that word.