Purpose and Background

Today, engineering organizations are more challenged than ever due to the high demand to build new infrastructure, and expand and maintain existing infrastructure. At the same time there are insufficient resources to meet the demand. More is expected of engineering professionals and the engineers are expected to meet this challenge. Engineers are taking on more responsibility with less experience and expected to produce high quality products. Therefore, it is essential that organizations strengthen their design controls to assure that quality products are ready for construction.

Public agencies, developers and public-private partnerships have numerous projects to plan, design and construct with funding for only a few. They are looking for ways to reduce construction costs so they can build more of these much needed projects. Construction cost overruns erode the available funds and potentially reduce the projects that are built. Many agencies have expressed their concerns with excessive construction cost overruns and relate these costs to the design development process. Designers can help by minimizing design errors, omissions, field change conditions and owners requested changes by improving their production quality.

Design organizations can improve production consistency and reliability of the products they develop with an improved quality management program and integrating the quality management position with the project manager and design manager on a project. This can be accomplished by having a strong quality management program that is built into the culture of the organization and separating the budget and schedule function from the quality management function. This webinar will increase your awareness of quality management and introduce new concepts on how to implement a successful quality management program in a design organization.

Learning Outcomes/Benefits

• Understand the importance in having a formal quality management program
• Understand how to effectively integrate a quality manager into project management and the project delivery process
• How to clearly distinguish the differences between quality assurance and quality control
• How to develop and implement a Continuous Improvement Program
• How to use performance metrics to on design products and score project and program performance
• How executives and managers influence the quality of work
• How to increase customer satisfaction

Intended Audience

If you are a public agency with more than three percent construction cost overruns or a private company with net earning erosion due to design errors and omissions, this webinar will help you. Public and private organizations that are responsible for the development of planning, design, construction management and operations of infrastructure projects are invited to learn more about how to improve consistency and reliability of design products, which is the grass roots solution for reducing construction cost overruns. This webinar will benefit executive management, construction managers, project managers, design managers, and all levels of engineers by helping you understand how to improve quality of the end products and increase customer satisfaction.

Webinar Outline

• Case Study
• Quality management organization and reporting
• Roles and responsibilities of quality in a design organization
• Quality Control Plan and Procedures
• Quality Assurance Program for continuous improvement
• The challenges for quality products on design-build projects

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