Improving Project Collaboration and Construction Quality with Photo and Video Documentation

It is a known fact that many organizations in the construction industry struggle to some degree in achieving acceptable levels of quality in their project delivery endeavors. Many construction & owner firms either have no formal quality management processes or their processes are deficient in one way or another. Many also do not train their project staff in quality management processes or procedures. OnSiteIQ delivers 360 vision and artificial intelligence-supported photo and video documentation systems to construction sites around the world, with the goal to improve the quality of their construction processes.

Why Quality Control is Crucial

Achieving the quality expectation of the project may be seen as meeting the aesthetic and functional requirements of the design, as well as the owner’s operational and maintenance requirements and the contractor’s compelling value proposition. How does OnSiteIQ define “quality”? For us, quality isn’t something that should be thought of as limited, nor should it be something that is considered temporary. Achieving quality is a habit something OnsiteIQ believes in and helps its customers achieve. OnSiteIQ covers every square inch of a job site and provides progress reports and analytics to construction owners.

The characteristics of the final product or service are an important aspect of quality. That requirement of quality creates an important metric by which the success of the completed project may be measured. In construction, this may be viewed as the quality of the product. The key participants in the project delivery process (the owner team, the design team, and the constructor team) may view quality from different or multiple perspectives. Besides the product perspective, quality may also be viewed from the production point of view as well as other perspectives such as value, utility, process, inputs, relationships, etc.

For the owner to receive a quality project, the contractor has to deliver it. To achieve this, the contractor must ensure that the work is put in place in accordance with the defined quality in the specification as well as meeting the expectation of the owner. These two factors may not always be the same. This involves two elements: one, the characteristics or quality of the product, and two, the value. The owner may look at the completed project from the budgetary perspective to determine if they have received value for the money spent. Some owners may also include relationship and responsiveness as other elements of value.

Transparency helps improve quality control in five key categories:

Quality of the work
Quality of the schedule
Quality of communication
Quality of life

For each section, we will take through the key bullet points that show how quality control is improved with photo and video construction documentation.

Quality of the Work

OnsiteIQ acknowledges that having boots on the ground, and being physically present on the site has no better alternative. A construction owner seeing the job site with their own eyes, and touching the dirt with their own hands, will always give them the best assessment of progress. However, the next best thing is a fully-integrated 360 remote system of photo and video documentation. With this type of visual coverage, an owner can get a better sense of the organization of the site. There is often a direct relationship between the organization of a construction site and its progress. Our 360 construction documentation technology helps give construction owners the context they need to better understand how the site has been organized.

Quality of the Schedule

As anyone who is in the construction industry knows, the success or failure of a job will be boiled down to whether or not it finished on time. Delays, safety hazards, and disorganization can delay a project, costing the construction owner thousands in overages. With photo and video construction documentation, owners can enjoy more control over the schedule of the project, due to the fact they are regularly getting updates and progress reports. When an owner is able to have more frequent and real-time information, the better quality of schedule they can provide since they will possess the knowledge of the project’s details in real-time.

Quality of Communication

OnSiteIQ creates a solution to the problem of making sure remote construction owners and developers have access to real-time progress. This critical solution helps facilitate better communication for critical meetings like that weekly OAC (Owner, Architect,

Contractor) meeting. OnSiteIQ bridges the knowledge gap for each major player in the project, making OAC meetings efficient, relevant, and proactive and helps complete the project on time.

Quality of Life

One aspect of quality control that photo and video documentation provides, is in the quality of life for construction owners, and construction teams. With an established, reliable, and real-time photo and video documentation platform, there will be a significant reduction in time and costs for travel. For every flight boarded, hotel room booked, and job site walk-through attended, that is more money and time being put towards the project. With a photo and video documentation solution, owners can frequent the site less, while still getting the relevant updates they need as the project progresses. While finances should be highly considered here, owners should think too about the amount of time they could save, which would let them focus more on their personal life.

An effective quality management process focuses on the development of products and/or services that meets the needs and exceeds the expectations of key customer groups. This is achieved by the creation of an integrated process that involves all levels of the organization and is focused on not only meeting but exceeding the customer’s expectations. To achieve this, each party in the project delivery process has to have systems and people operating in such a way as to create a defect-free, high-quality product or service. OnSiteIQ’s core mission is to make remote access to job sites easier for construction owners and the project and construction teams. We are constantly working to improve the quality control of our product, by developing our technology so that owners are getting better analytics, data, and visual clarity.

You can request a demo from OnSiteIQ, if you think your construction project could use more detailed record keeping. OnSiteIQ continually audits and crafts its product so that we are looking for ways to improve all five areas of quality control explained above for our customers.