Quality Management System at Engineering Construction Projects Assignment

Assignment Task

Research Problem

Engineering projects often involve higher complexities due to budget and time constraints. There is higher need for effective quality management principles and techniques for addressing the challenges that can impact the successful completion of the projects. The engineering projects such as construction, infrastructure development, manufacturing, or transportation projects. These are high budget projects and are associated with greater risks of cost and time overruns (Anvari et al., 2011). This occurs largely on account of ineffective planning and designing leading to the occurrence of quality issues and this can result in flaws in design causing reworks and delays in project completion. The breakdown of communication among the project stakeholders such as engineers, architects, contractors, and the clients can also result in causing project delays. In addition to this, the issues such as sourcing of poor-quality raw materials, ineffective allocation of resources and lack of culture of continuous improvement are also responsible for the project delays. Therefore, there is need for adopting proper quality management techniques to ensure successful completion of the projects on time. The principles of quality management techniques such as lean and TQM (Total Quality Management) can be leveraged for the purpose of overcoming the quality risks and challenges faced by the engineering projects.

This is because these quality management techniques can enable in streamlining the project activities, ensuring effective of resources, waste minimisation and thereby improving the performance of the project. However, there stills exists a large gap between the usefulness of the lean and TQM in managing the quality of the engineering projects and thus increasing the performance by overcoming the risks and uncertainties present within them (Meiling et al., 2012). In this context, the present research is undertaken for the purpose of analysing the effectiveness lean principles and total quality management principles in enhancing the quality management in engineering projects.

Research Topic

The present research will intend to address the following research questions as stated below:

• What are the different factors causing quality management issues in the engineering projects?
• How does the integration of quality management techniques such as lean and total quality management techniques contributing in improving the performance of engineering projects?

The above stated research questions will be analysed and evaluated in detail through exploring the academic literatures in relation to lean and TQM concepts and their application within improving the quality performance of the engineering projects. The lean and TQM techniques focus on driving continuous improvement in the project outcomes by continually identifying the defects that needs to be addressed and reducing the waste to achieve the project goals and objectives.

In this context, the research objectives are outlined as below:

• To identify the major challenges and problems impacting the quality performance of engineering projects
• To conduct an in-depth investigation of the quality management techniques such as lean and total quality management for enhancing the project effectiveness
• To explore the usefulness of lean and TQM quality management techniques in improving the effectiveness of engineering projects

Research Environment

The research will be carried out by actively collaborating with the engineering firms and relevant stakeholders. The engineering firms can range from different industries such as construction, transportation, manufacturing, infrastructure, and others that are involved in carrying out different projects. The other stakeholders can range from project managers, engineers, project directors and consultants, quality assurance professionals, project team members and others involved in carrying out the project. The engineering firms and the other stakeholder groups consists of the research group that needs to be involved in carrying out the engineering project. The demographics of the research group include the individuals who will be benefited from the research findings such as engineering firms, project stakeholders and others.

Academic Relevance

The research field holds high significance in the context of developing an understanding of the effectiveness of lean principles and total quality management techniques to improve the performance of projects in engineering context. This will enable in developing an in-depth into the different components of these principles so that they can be successfully applied for overcoming the quality management issues. The lean management will enable in achieving a state of continuous improvement while TQM approach emphasis on reducing the occurrence of errors or defects and fixing them continuously while encouraging the involvement of all stakeholders leading to better quality results.

Literature Review

Demirkesen and Ozorhon (2017) stated that there is higher importance of ensuring effective quality management in properly carrying and executing the engineering projects and meeting the needs and expectations of the diverse stakeholders and complying properly with the required laws and regulations. The engineering projects can involve different type of projects such as contributing building, developing roads or other types of infrastructures and such others that incurs higher amount of budget and funds. As per Aziz and Hafez (2013) the major challenges that are impact the successful completion of the engineering projects are lack of collaboration among the project team members, lack of continued resource availability and their ineffective allocation, ineffective change management, inadequate supply of funds, waste generation, defects and reworks and such others. Therefore, according to Meiling et al. (2012) there is higher need for ensuring proper quality control in the engineering projects for meeting the determined criteria and specifications provided by the client. These criteria or specifications determines the standards to be achieved such as completing the project on time, actively collaborating with stakeholders and such others. It is therefore highly essential to implement best management practices for ensuring the success of the project. In this context, the concept of TQM (Total Quality Management) is process-oriented approach that can be used for managing the quality issues in engineering projects. In the views of Anvari et al. (2011) this would enable in promoting collaboration, reducing costs, ensuring timely completion, and enhancing the performance of the project. In the approach, the term ‘total’ implies to the collaboration across the different stakeholders of the project such as teams, departments, and the various project activities.

This enables in achieving transparency in completing the different phase of the project by gaining the trust of the stakeholders. The active stakeholder collaboration drives in identifying the potential issues, developing clear benchmarks, and determining the required steps to be adopted for achieving quality control. The engineering projects can achieve higher transparency and minimise the occurrence of errors by complying with the TQM principles. It drives continuous improvement in the different stages of project by minimising the errors and therefore can be stated as an iterative approach to achieve higher quality. This is achieved through regular inspection that intends to measure the quality of the products and as such that does not meet the determined requirements are rejected for further improvement to achieve the stated benchmarks. The quality control is achieved through evaluation of a product against the stated requirements 6 and identifying the flaws or defects and recommending the changes of improvement (Panuwatwanich and Nguyen, 2017). On the other hand, as per Anvari et al. (2011) the process of quality assurance involves ensuring that the determined standards and procedures are adhered within the entire life cycle of the project. The major goal is to prevent the occurrence of faults and this can be achieved through conducting regular audits for regular monitoring and overviewing.

Research Design

Research design has been defined as a plan that aims to develop the framework for collecting the data. Th selected research design for this research study is qualitative research design. In layman language, research design is set of strategies that are implemented in research, it outlines on how data will be collected and evaluated to solve the research questions. The purpose of selecting the qualitative research design is to investigate the insights, experiences and challenges faced by the company project engineers while integrating the lean principles and Total Quality Management (TQM) in engineering projects. As per the understanding, it is true that qualitative research design is well suited for solving the complex research problems by collecting and evaluating the subjective interpretations provided by participants. Through using the semi-structured interviews, researchers can collect the rich and detailed information on participants experiences and their perspective on research question (Isaacs, 2014).

In this research study, data will be collected through use of semi-structured interviews and it will be the primary method of data collection. Primary method of data collection refers to the data that is collected directly from the sources. Here, the sources are participants from whom the interviews will be done and data will be collected. Semi-structured interviews is one of the best ways to collect the structured data as it provides the flexible framework to gather the participants experiences and it also ensures the consistency across the interviews. To give the proper direction to this research study, the research process “Onion” of Saunders has been adopted.

This research process provides the range of choices, strategies, paradigms and steps that researchers need to followed while performing the research

Research Questions

Operationalisation In order to operationalize the research questions there is need to study the key concepts of lean management principles and TQM especially in context of engineering projects. TQM refers to the methods that focuses on the improving the quality, aligning the outputs as per company values and also aims for the customer satisfaction. Lean principles works on the concepts that aims for waste reduction, value streamlining and also focus on the continuous improvement. In qualitative research design there are various that need to be considered and they as under:

Setting: It has been decided to collect the data from urban areas as most of engineering projects are located in this area. It means urban settings can provide information related to various engineering projects across different sections. Organisation setting comprises of engineering firms which is involved in various types of projects like manufacturing, constructions and any other project (Basias and Pollalis, 2018).

Population: The target population for this research study are the project engineers that works for the engineer firms across various domains. The main reason to select the project engineers as the main source for data collection is their direct involvement in project management and the knowledge towards the lean and TQM applications in projects. Project engineers are being selected on the basis of their experience level, involvement in lean and TQM practices and project towards responsibilities. There have been no issues that can be found in the target population except their willing to express the information required for this research. 11

Sample: Purposive sampling method will be used as a sampling strategy to select the project engineers that are involved in diverse projects and have experience as per the research topic. Purposive sampling method allow to make selection of participate on the basis their ability to provide details on the specific concept, theme and phenomenon. So, interviews will be performed with specific individuals that have knowledge in application of lean principles and TQM in project management practices. Participants for this research study will be selected through industry associations, direct contact with engineering firms and using the professional network. The complete process requires identifying participants, establishing the contact with them and explaining about the study purpose and procedure (Basias and Pollalis, 2018). Obtaining the voluntary participation from target participants is required as it is important for ethical consideration.

Data Analysis

Methods It is already discussed that for this research study, Qualitative data will be collected using the interview process. After the data has been collected it is important to perform the analysis on such data collected. For this purpose, thematic analysis has been performed to make analysis of qualitative data collected. Thematic analysis is very useful tool make analysis of qualitative data as it allows to identify the patterns, themes and research categories from the research data collected. Thematic analysis consists of various steps such as familiarization within the data, theme development, coding and lastly interpretation of finding to find the solution to the research question.

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