It’s common sense that whoever is doing the work shouldn’t be checking it.
Such is one of the reasons why an Independent Quality Assurance Firm (IQAF) is recruited to examine the work.
The benefits and challenges of this regime, which was developed for quality assurance requirements of Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure Ontario public-private partnership projects, was the focus of a recent panel discussion billed as Quality Management During Construction, held virtually at the Ontario Road Builders’ Association Summit.
The panellists focused on the evolution of quality management from design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) to design-build-finance (DBF) to include the IQAF and its role given risk allocation within a DBF. The primary difference is DBF does not include the long-term life cycle maintenance and rehabilitation, operational readiness and hand back requirements indicative of the DBFM model.
The IQAF introduces an independent firm with the necessary experience and qualifications to perform the quality assurance acceptance tasks developed in the inspection and testing plan.
“In the DBF, the long-term maintenance is not contracted through projectco and there is a new role called the Independent Quality Assurance Firm connected under the quality director and embedded in the quality management system,” explained Allan Fraser, principal and director of operations, transportation field services with Morrison Hershfield.
“The main drivers of the IQAF are independence and clear separation of quality assurance acceptance of the work from the design-build contracting team, thereby assuring quality assurance activities are independent from quality control and not at risk of becoming secondary to production or schedule.”
There is also no long-term maintenance or 30-year concession period that includes many performance measures or metrics that are intended to motivate or backstop quality of work during design and construction, he added.
The IQAF regime was first developed on the Highway 401 expansion project five years ago, said Kelvin Chu, director of roads and special projects with Infrastructure Ontario. It’s based on three principles including addressing the change in risk transfer relating to maintenance.
“We hope to put a high emphasis on quality and ensuring at the end of construction that quality infrastructure is handed back to us when MTO needs to maintain the infrastructure,” he said.
The second principle is reinforcement of collaborations, where an independent quality assurance firm is “placed within the project co and reporting to both the project company and contracting authority, which creates a network of communication channels that are critical in ensuring the quality management plan is being upheld,” he said.
The third principle is independence of quality control versus quality assurance.
“As all of you know, whoever is doing the work shouldn’t really be checking it,” he said. “We enforce a quality control that is done by the contractor versus the quality assurance being done by the independent quality assurance firm. “
Jeremy Landry, a contract innovations policy specialist with the MTO, said one of the things that is fundamental is having transparency right from the development of the inspection and test plans.
“The IQAF, we see their fingerprints on the inspection and test plans that get presented to the contracting authority. We see the transparency in the provision of the quality records, the transparency having them take part in quality meetings with the contracting authority and with the rest of the project company,” he said.
One of the main benefits he said, is the third-party nature of the IQAF.
“What that comes down to is when there is something that needs to be discussed, a deficiency or a non-conformance, it’s good to have a third voice there, whereas previously in a DBFM you will have the contracting authority and the project company. Sometimes it can become a little bit positional although obviously everyone wants to resolve the issue,” said Landry. “Having the IQAF there really focusing on the quality assurance and the quality acceptance side of things (is beneficial).
“It’s early on. We’re going to keep reviewing these things and trying to drive some improvements into future project agreements when we use the IQAF.”
Sammy Lee, a project director with Altus Group, said the regime has only been used on a handful of P3 projects in Ontario and there are some improvements that can be made to enhance it, including better communication and collaboration between all parties.
“One of the improvements I can think of is how we continue to enhance the actual regime: roles and responsibilities in the project agreements especially the working relationship between IQAF project co and the relationship between IQAF and MTO/IO,” he said. “Ultimately we’re talking about a public-private partnership project and it really refers to the partnership between project co and the contracting authority. It could extend to IQAF. Maybe at the beginning of the project kickoff meetings or throughout the project term, IQAF have individual meetings with the project authority so we can all work collaboratively to deliver the project.”
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