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Quality Assurance Procedures Our design quality assurance program was developed bearing in mind an agency's control over a project outcome decreases and the cost of fixing a design problem increases exponentially over time, as shown at right: A review of the graph at right should show the obvious. The most effective quality assurance programs focus on activities at the beginning of the design effort rather than waiting until the end, when little budget still remains. To this end, our six -point Quality Assurance Program has been developed around the following imperatives. 160 140 120 100 so 60 40 20 p% y6e .ma c 4,6S ce o° o° ,per u° `` o". e aoe oe W of i�E a os'3` o�E "od' eo°I` qoP odl' o°° oe° a VV Y f C l ■ Relative Ci,stof Puing Problem (% of Bid Pram) ■ ReaBsti,, [lent Con[mlover Desired Outcome (%) 1. Proactive listening to clients. The first step toward quality is to make a concerted effort to listen to people throughout your organization to gain a clear understanding of what you need and want. This requires: 1. Researching in advance standards published on client websites or elsewhere to gain a thorough understanding of client expectations 2. Directly asking managers, engineers, operators and other stakeholders throughout your organization what they need, want and expect in the delivered product 3. Preparing and submitting opinions of probable cost at the earliest possible milestone, preferably the kickoff meeting, to assure budgets and expectations are compatible 4. Documenting findings in meeting minutes or similar documents to provide clients with an opportunity to promptly correct or clarify misunderstandings 2. Utility and subsurface structure research. To design buried improvements, accurate location and plotting of utilities and substructures is critical. This requires: 1. Obtaining record maps from utilities identified through inquiries to Underground Service Alert plus utilities such as Caltrans or railroads who do not subscribe to Underground Service Alert 2. Critical review of record drawings to note possible existence of other buried facilities, including thrust blocks, vaults, and bridge piles, which rarely appear on record drawings 3. Addressing comments received from Utilities after their review of preliminary plans showing record drawing information 4. Field reconnaissance and plotting of locations of visible surface features, including manhole covers, valve covers, utility boxes, marking posts, pavement repair strips, and culvert end sections, which might indicate the presence of other buried utilities 3. Constant learning. While our project teams bring together professional engineers with decades of experience, project team members are still encouraged to set aside time to improve skills and keep skills current. This includes participation in Greenbook committees as well as monthly review of changes to codes and standards, and updating standard templates used to produce engineering calculations, designs, specifications, and cost opinions. In addition, in-house training is encouraged to promote development of skills at all levels of design. 4. In-house specifications templates. To streamline production as well as to systematically document lessons learned in an accessible format, we maintain a library of approximately 600 standard specifications "test- driven" on hundreds of previous projects and reviewed by public agencies. Some of these were the basis for sections of the regional Standard Specifications for Public Works Construction (Greenbook). Most incorporate not only direct experience, but indirect lessons learned by reverse -engineering other regional and agency standards.