Why We Need to Prioritise Quality Over Quantity in South African Construction Management

The construction sector is growing at a rapid rate, resulting in managers often neglecting industry standards in favour of creating more at speed. But as the construction sector in sub-Saharan Africa continues to develop its infrastructure and show great investment potential, construction managers will need to prioritise quality over quantity if they want to reap the rewards.

Watch Michelle Chesa, Guest Expert on the University of Cape Town Construction Management online short course, discuss the current industry landscape.

Transcript

The construction industry’s commitment to quality, at the moment, in South Africa, in summary, I would say, is very poor. Quality is currently not a priority. Many people are just hoping that, in all the rushing, they hope that they get a building of good quality, but it’s not the first thing that everyone is thinking about when they walk onto a construction site.

Analyse quantity and cost versus quality

Because of the triangle of time, cost, and quality, whenever you push one of the two, then one of the three is going to suffer, and at the moment, with the pressures of the industry and of the economy, quality is suffering because of the time that is being pushed, of the cost that is being pushed, trying to save money, and, at the end of the day, the quality is then neglected.

Understand the implications of poor quality management practices

Unfortunately, the clients are the ones that are mostly affected by poor quality standards because they’re the ones paying, and they’re the ones receiving the product at the end of the day. So, they’re the ones that lose the money. They’re the ones who do not have time to recover any of the time lost during the project, and they’re stuck with the product that they didn’t like in the first place. Even if someone may want to sue the contractor, they may get some of their money back, but to be honest, you’ve lost the time, and most clients are developers, and they have tenants that are waiting to move into these buildings, and, at the end of the day, they are the ones that really do lose out.

Discover the consequences for neglecting quality standards

If you don’t manage your work properly, then your reputation goes down the drain. I always say that you’re only as good as your last project. So, if you mess up on one project then, unfortunately that’s what your name is going to be pinned onto. And the other thing is reworks. And the cost of reworks is very high at the moment, and I personally believe that it’s because contractors don’t have quality systems in place. So, because of that, you now have reworks, you now have to divert some resources that you had assigned to other projects to go back to redo work that you’re not going to get paid for.

How stakeholders can influence industry standards

The stakeholders in the South African industry, at the moment, I think they can contribute into ensuring that quality becomes a priority, if I can put it across that way. If, for example, standards are just raised that this is now a priority, this is now a regulation, this is now as per tender, then I think that that would also help to just raise the bar of quality and making sure that people are trained, if the stakeholders in the industry put certain standards in place to say that, “I need to see an artisan card for each and every person who’s working on-site” like they used to do before, then we would see a dramatic increase and a dramatic improvement in the quality of work that is produced.