Quality management 25 years on: What can we learn about initiatives in construction?

The British Construction industry has a history of initiatives, which have been promoted to improve it. Seldom is there a reflection from a historical perspective of these developments, merely a restatement of the recurring failings. In 1979 the British standard BS 5750, a management system to assure customers that what they receive was consistent, was introduced. This paper seeks to derive learning from the developments and implementation of this over the last 25years. A number of quality managers in the Midlands were interviewed to reflect on and relate their experiences and to establish whether they had achieved improvement in this time. The results show that there was, and still is, a number of contradictions in initiatives, in particular, that between bureaucratic control and people management. The reservations that many had about the use of formal Quality Assurance in the 1980s, can be seen in recent initiatives such as benchmarking in Rethinking Construction in 1998. The developments in TQM following the former and Respect for People following the latter demonstrate the dynamic character of these initiatives within the circumstances of their time. Organisations recognised that the fundamental element of quality or performance is people and that by investing in them, long-term and sustainable improvement can be ensured. The learning is that initiatives are contradictory but require an ability to work with this in order to drive change but take people along.