Quality, commissioning and closeout plan

Chief Diane Arsenault came to the team's fourth review meeting with a list. It was not about schedules or prices. It listed the problems her crews had lived with in the old fire hall: overhead doors that reversed for no reason, a vehicle exhaust system that nobody knew how to reset, a generator that had never been tested under load, and a station alerting system that sometimes failed to wake the bunk room at night. 'I do not care how you build it,' she said, smiling, 'as long as all of that works on the first night.' Aaliyah wrote 'the first night' at the top of her quality chapter, and it became the test for every part of it.

This lesson covers the tenth deliverable: the quality, commissioning and closeout plan. It draws on quality control, inspection and testing (CON-345) and on renovation, commissioning and project closeout (CON-385). For a new building, the plan must show how the contractor will build the work right the first time, prove that it is right, make the systems work together, and hand over a building that its users can run from the first day.

Quality management: preventing defects, not finding them

Quality control on a construction site is often thought of as inspection: someone checks work after it is done and lists what is wrong. Inspection matters, but by the time a defect is found, the cost of fixing it has already been incurred. A good quality plan puts most of its effort earlier: clear requirements, approved submittals, mock-ups, a preparatory meeting before each new type of work, and an inspection of the first piece of work before the rest is built.

Tamarack's quality plan for Pembrook named Marcel LeBlanc, the superintendent, as responsible for quality in the field, with Aaliyah as quality coordinator and each subtrade foreman responsible for the quality of their own crew's work. It listed the specification sections with the highest quality risk: concrete slabs and apron, masonry, air and vapour barriers, roofing, the overhead doors, the exhaust extraction system and the life safety systems. For each, it set out how the work would be checked.

The inspection and test plan

An inspection and test plan, or ITP, lists for each part of the work what will be inspected or tested, against what standard, by whom, how often and with what record. It marks hold points, where work may not continue until an inspection is done and accepted, and witness points, where the owner's representative or the Consultant must be given notice and may attend.

Some inspections are required by law or by the building permit rather than the contract. The municipality's building official inspects at stages set by the permit, and the Nova Scotia building code requires certain work, such as structural elements, to be reviewed by the engineer of record. The plan listed these separately so that the schedule allowed time for them.

Concrete testing is one of the most frequent activities in the ITP. The Pembrook specifications called for one set of test cylinders for every 50 m³ of each concrete mix placed in a day, or part of 50 m³, with at least one set per day for each mix. Tomas used the pour schedule to estimate how many sets would be needed, so that the testing allowance could be checked.

# Concrete cylinder sets required by the specification for the main pours
import math
per_set = 50        # one set per this volume of each mix per day, or part of it
pours = [  # (description, volume in m3)
    ('Strip footings, day 1', 24), ('Strip footings, day 2', 23.5), ('Frost walls, 4 pours', 61.6),
    ('Support wing slab', 67.5), ('Apparatus bay slab, east half', 66), ('Apparatus bay slab, west half', 66),
    ('South apron', 140), ('Training tower footing', 12),
]
total_sets = 0
for name, vol in pours:
    days = 4 if 'Frost walls' in name else 1     # at least one set per day of placing
    sets = max(days, math.ceil(vol / per_set))
    total_sets += sets
    print(f'{name:30s} {vol:6.1f} m3  {sets} set(s)')
print(f'Total cylinder sets: {total_sets}; at about $250 per set, testing costs about ${total_sets * 250:,}')

Strip footings, day 1            24.0 m3  1 set(s)
Strip footings, day 2            23.5 m3  1 set(s)
Frost walls, 4 pours             61.6 m3  4 set(s)
Support wing slab                67.5 m3  2 set(s)
Apparatus bay slab, east half    66.0 m3  2 set(s)
Apparatus bay slab, west half    66.0 m3  2 set(s)
South apron                     140.0 m3  3 set(s)
Training tower footing           12.0 m3  1 set(s)
Total cylinder sets: 16; at about $250 per set, testing costs about $4,000

The result, sixteen sets for the main pours, fitted comfortably within the testing allowance, even with apron and site concrete added later. The calculation also reminded the team that test cylinders are made on site, so the testing agency had to be booked for every pour, including the Saturday apron pour.

When something is wrong: non-conformance

Even with good prevention, some work will not meet the requirements. The plan set out a simple non-conformance process. Whoever finds a problem records it on a non-conformance report with a photograph, the requirement it fails, and its location. The responsible foreman proposes a fix, which the superintendent approves, or the Consultant approves when the fix departs from the contract documents. The fix is made, re-inspected and closed, and the report stays in the quality records. Aaliyah reviewed open reports at every weekly meeting and looked for patterns: three reports about the same detail meant the detail, the instructions or the training needed attention, not just the three locations.

Two rules made the process work. First, reporting a non-conformance was never punished; hiding one was. Second, nothing covered by a hold point could be closed in until its non-conformances were resolved, so that a problem in a wall's reinforcing could not disappear behind grout. The plan also set a target: no more than five open non-conformance reports older than two weeks at any time.

Submittals and mock-ups

Shop drawings, product data and samples show the Consultant exactly what the contractor intends to install before it is fabricated. A submittal schedule, built from the specifications and linked to the procurement schedule in lesson 3, sets when each submittal is due, how long review takes, and when the approved item is needed. Late submittals are one of the commonest causes of delay on design-bid-build projects, because each one waits in a review queue. Tamarack planned to submit the long-lead items first, reviewed each submittal itself before sending it, and tracked every one in a log reviewed at the weekly meeting.

Mock-ups are full-size samples of the work built on site and approved before production starts. Pembrook's specifications required a masonry mock-up panel showing the brick, mortar colour, joints, flashings and a window opening, and an envelope mock-up showing the air and vapour barrier transitions at a window, a roof edge and an overhead door jamb. The second was worth far more than its cost: water and air leaks at those transitions are among the most common defects in new buildings, and they are very expensive to fix once the cladding is on.

Commissioning the station's systems

Commissioning is the process of verifying that a building's systems are designed, installed, tested and able to operate as the owner intends. For a fire station, the systems that matter most are those the chief listed, and they matter because they work together. When a call comes in, the station alerting system must wake the right crews, turn on the lights along the route to the bay, open the right overhead doors, start the exhaust extraction for the departing trucks and, in some stations, shut off the kitchen stove. A failure anywhere in that chain fails the whole response.

The most important test was an integrated systems test near the end of construction: a simulated call at 3:00 in the morning, with the building on generator power after a simulated utility failure. The plan scheduled it in week 54, with the fire department, the alerting vendor, the exhaust extraction vendor, Tamarack's subtrades and the commissioning agent present. Lesson 6's schedule allowed four weeks for testing and commissioning, and Aaliyah's plan showed how those four weeks would be used day by day.

Closeout and handover

Closeout begins long before the end. The plan set out how Tamarack would reach substantial performance and then completion: a deficiency list prepared by Tamarack's own team before inviting the Consultant to review, so that the Consultant's list would be short; operations and maintenance manuals assembled as systems were installed rather than at the end; record drawings updated monthly; and warranties collected as each subtrade finished. Substantial performance would trigger the start of the lien period and the warranty period, and the release of holdback would follow when the lien period passed without claims.

Training was the item the chief cared about most. A fire station runs around the clock with several crews, called platoons or shifts, who rotate. Training each system once, on one day shift, would leave most firefighters untrained. The plan required each vendor to train every platoon, to record the sessions on video for later use, and to provide short quick-reference guides at each control panel. The town's facilities staff received separate, more technical training for maintenance.

Your capstone deliverable

• A quality management plan with responsibilities, high-risk work and the quality sequence from submittals to closeout.
• An inspection and test plan extract with hold and witness points, including inspections required by law or permit.
• A submittal and mock-up plan linked to the procurement schedule.
• A commissioning plan for the main systems, with an integrated systems test.
• A closeout plan covering deficiencies, manuals, record drawings, warranties, training and the release of money held back.