This is a case study of a large US general contractor's efforts to rethink and implement a new behavior-based approach to quality to achieve zero errors, zero defects, zero rework, and zero surprises. This GC has a long history of building a culture of Behavior-Based Safety and has approached quality the same way. Recognition of upstream behaviors that resulted in quality issues and unpredictable results during construction led to a focus on changing the mindset and behaviors of all project stakeholders to enable the team to achieve the intended results. While owners and designers have an indirect connection to safety results, their behavior and actions directly affect quality outcomes. Although developed independently of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), this GC's approach is similar. Its approach focuses on understanding the customer's expectations and what is required technically in detail from suppliers to achieve them. It focuses on understanding and describing in technical terms what are the 'distinguishing' features of the work from each stakeholder's perspective, and on aligning its teams on measurable acceptance criteria to achieve customer expectations. This process for making knowledge explicit in order to agree on what quality means to the customer allows the team to fabricate and install its products correctly in such a way as to close the 'knowing-doing' gap that plagues most companies and projects.

This paper introduces a novel General Contractor approach to quality management called the Systems Approach to Quality (SAQ), which shares the Behavior-Based Quality (BBQ) concern for individual initiative and responsibility, and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) principles. Building on that previous work, this paper investigates the quantitative and cultural impacts of implementing a company's SAQ approach in its construction projects across the U.S. To do so, the authors examine lagging indicators of various performance areas including cost, schedule, quality, safety, and changes for a group of projects that implemented the SAQ approach and compare them to another group of projects that did not. The hypothesis under investigation is that SAQ implementation in projects improves performance across a range of critical indicators. Furthermore, the study compares project culture in projects where SAQ was implemented to those where it was not using Quinn's Competing Values Framework (CVF). The early results from this work indicate that the implementation of an approach such as SAQ leads to significant financial and non-cost benefits including improved collaboration.

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This paper is the third in the series, taking a cross-discipline view of project performance to investigate and understand the potential correlation between system inputs and outputs. In the 2021 paper "The Impact of Implementing a System Approach to Quality: A General Contractor Case Study," the authors compared project performance outcomes and team cultural assessments for 11 projects that had implemented a Systems Approach to Quality (SAQ), the Intervention group, against a similar set of projects that had implemented a compliance-based approach to quality, the Control group. This paper continues to investigate the project performance outputs for these two groups and specifically looks at the Request for Information (RFI) and Potential Change Item (PCI) workflows. This case study considers if RFI and PCI metrics can be used to determine if better quality design contributed to better performance outcomes. Then it considers how RFI and PCI processes relate to SAQ implementation. The authors' findings suggest that applying SAQ resulted in project teams documenting RFIs sooner in the project lifecycle and experiencing faster closure rates compared to the Control group.

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