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.

This paper describes a methodology for understanding how staffing projects may be assessed and considers how it may relate to project team performance when project teams implement a Systems Approach to Quality (SAQ). This paper expands on the 2021 paper "The Impact of Implementing a System Approach to Quality: A General Contractor Case Study" where the authors compared project performance outcomes and team cultural assessments for 11 projects that had implemented SAQ, the Intervention group, to a similar set of projects that had continued with a specification compliance -based approach to quality, the Control group. This study reflects organizational learning in a continuous improvement process and helps clarify distinguishing features of staffing for this General Contractor. The authors findings suggest that applying SAQ can help sustain a project team through the phases of ever-changing project life cycles and contribute to more reliable outcomes when staff is engaged earlier in the project and supported with Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) and outside project management resources.

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.

This paper explains what leaders of a change initiative for a new systems approach to Quality did and how they assessed the impact of their work within a large US construction management and general contracting company. All three of the authors were engaged directly or indirectly in the initiative. The research question is to understand what the organizational change agents did to measure the impact of the work contemporaneously and overall. The ideas of three well-known organizational change thought leaders influenced the work of these agents. This paper describes the iterative development of the change initiative over seven years and how leaders used data in combination with participant feedback to assess the impact of the work. Key findings are: the systems approach to Quality was applicable in all five of the organization's core markets, and onethird of all projects by revenue in the five years of data studied attempted to implement the approach.