Features of a Behavior-Based Quality System (BBQS)

Abstract

Meeting quality expectations is vital to the successful delivery of construction projects. Still, the levels of quality achieved in practice are often unsatisfactory, resulting in rework or acceptance of poor work, and impacting the project cost, schedule, safety, team morale, reputation of the organizations and individuals involved in the project, and overall customer satisfaction. Quality management research has relied on statistical process control, tolerances, and standards development. In the last years, though, attention has been shifting towards theoretical and philosophical foundations of quality, and the role people play in planning to define quality expectations and achieving them. The contribution to knowledge of this paper is to expand on the literature on Behavior-Based Quality (BBQ) by introducing the Behavior-Based Quality System (BBQS) and presenting some of its features. We present theoretical foundations of this system and illustrate some of its features through a case study. The purpose of this paper is twofold, (1) to promote more systemic thinking about the management of quality, and (2) to present features of a system that supports such thinking.