Quality Culture Auditing for Engineering Consultants

Abstract

Design is one of the most important aspects in the engineering project cycle. To improve the quality of engineering consulting firms, various quality techniques and practices have been proposed by researchers. Most researchers agree that the successful implementation of such quality practices depends on the quality culture of the consultant organization. Therefore, a thorough understanding of the overall quality culture that exists in a consultant organization is essential. The purpose of this paper is to develop a pragmatic tool, a quality culture auditing (QCA) questionnaire, which enables engineering consulting firms to measure the quality culture quantitatively through a scoring system. The responses obtained from 30 engineering consulting firms that participated in the QCA show that the scores obtained can be a good indicator of a consultant organization’s current quality culture. Using these results as the basis, benchmarking exercises and parametric studies can also be conducted. Through the use of QCA, an engineering consultant can pinpoint areas of weakness so that more effort can be put into these areas for future improvement.