Study of the Coherences and Dependencies between Quality and Risk Management, within the Construction Industry

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The present dissertation first focused on investigating Quality and Risk Management in an attempt to briefly explain them to someone non-initiated toward Project Management. To do so, an investigation of the existing state-of-the art takes place in this report. It was found that Quality Management improves processes and strategies as to lead to better project quality and ensure satisfaction of needs, whereas Risk Management focuses on mitigating threats and increasing opportunities to enhance project’s performance and avoid deviations from requirements. The essay, then intended to find the coherences and dependencies that exist between Quality and Risk Management as to further clarify them and to propose a new approach that would merge both these tools together if more efficiency can be demonstrated. Such a task is reached by analysing the literature review and extracting relationships between the fields of study. These links are also detailed thanks to an examination of a real case study, which purpose was to confirm or to invalidate the previous theoretical findings. The key results extracted from this study were first, a certain complementarity between the systems, in terms of interchangeability and compensation. Secondly, robust similarities among the tools were discovered, regarding their intended purpose, their methodologies and their use for construction projects, according to both participants and stages. These relationships were fortunately confirmed by the case study as well as the advantages of merging QM and RM: enhanced project performance in terms of quality and risks, but also cost, time and communication.