Quality Control

The gap between contracted and delivered

Service quality in facilities is usually assessed by complaint volume. Few complaints is read as good performance. This is a weak instrument. Complaint volume measures tolerance and reporting habit at least as much as it measures service, and it is systematically blind to anything occupants cannot see, which includes most of what actually preserves the asset.

Planned maintenance is the clearest case. If quarterly servicing on a piece of equipment is skipped, nobody complains, because nothing observable happens. The consequence arrives years later as shortened equipment life, and by then the contractor who skipped it may no longer hold the contract.

What verification involves

• Reading the contract carefully enough to establish what was actually promised, which is frequently not what either party believes.
• Sampling delivered work against those requirements on a defined schedule, with a documented method rather than a walkthrough impression.
• Reconciling completion records against physical evidence. A work order marked complete is a claim, not a verification.
• Testing the reporting itself. Where a contractor self reports performance, the reporting mechanism deserves at least as much scrutiny as the reported number.
• Documenting findings in a form that supports a conversation with the vendor and, if it comes to it, a contractual remedy.

What this is not

It is not an adversarial exercise, and it works badly when it is framed as one. The most common outcome of a first verification cycle is not that a contractor is cheating. It is that the specification is ambiguous, both parties have been operating in good faith on different readings of it, and the discrepancy has been absorbed quietly by whichever side had less leverage.

Finding that early is valuable to both parties. Good contractors tend to welcome clear measurement, because it distinguishes them from competitors who bid against a vague standard and deliver to the vague standard.

Setting it up so it survives

Verification that depends on one attentive person stops when that person changes role. The deliverable from this practice area is therefore a method: defined sample sizes, defined frequencies, defined evidence, and a reporting format that a successor can pick up. We would rather leave behind a routine your team runs than a dependency on us running it.