- 20 Sep 2026 Excel and paper work until the record has to be defended Every contractor and every factory started QA on paper or in Excel. That is not a failure. A printed checklist and a spreadsheet with a tab per job are the cheapest QA system there is, and for a lot of work they are ...
- 17 Sep 2026 Your QA record is part of the bid, whether you meant it to be or not Most civil and infrastructure tenders, and most prequalification packs for precast and engineered-products supply, ask some version of the same question: what is your QA system? Most bidders answer it with a paragraph ...
- 16 Sep 2026 The work is finished. The record isn't. Progress claims get held on civil projects because the quality record behind a claim line does not support it when the Nominated Authority assesses the claim. The work is usually done, and usually fine. What is missing ...
- 16 Sep 2026 Work stops here until someone signs A hold point is set out in the Inspection and Test Plan (ITP). Its a 'stop work' order beyond which work must not proceed until the nominated party has inspected it and released it. On AU/NZ civil contracts that party ...
- 13 Sep 2026 An ITP filled in at the end of the job is not a record. It's a reconstruction. In a survey we ran with the Civil Contractors Federation, 86% of engineers and supervisors said they spend five hours a week or more on QA and ITP admin. A lot of that time goes on rebuilding a record after the fact. In ...
- 2 Sep 2026 The handover pack that builds itself Practical completion is one thing – the handover pack is another. The signed ITPs, the hold point sign-offs, the photos that prove the work was done to spec: they all exist – you hope, and now someone has to find them.
- 2 Sep 2026 Standardising QA as you scale In civil infrastructure, consistency matters as much as speed. Work runs across multiple crews, subcontractors, and regions, under tight programmes and real scrutiny. Yet in many growing teams, the quality of the work ...
- 2 Sep 2026 QA vs QC in construction: the difference, and why contracts care The two get used interchangeably on site, and on most days it doesn't matter. It matters at tender, when the question is "what's your QA system?", and it matters at month-end, when the superintendent wants the records ...
- 2 Sep 2026 The hidden costs of a QA system that lags the work QA and progress are supposed to move together. On a lot of projects the documentation runs somewhere behind the physical work – days, weeks, sometimes right up to handover, when someone has to pull the whole record ...
- 2 Sep 2026 No proof, no payment How much of your last progress claim got held?
