Quality Management Of Apic Consult – Analysis And Recommendations

Discussion on a Selection of Current Project

Discuss about the Quality Management of Apic Consult.

APIC CONSULT has been serving as the standard project consultant and general contractor for various government agencies and private companies. In this study, preliminary knowledge in program and project risk management and evaluation are analyzed. This also includes the quality control and planning, quality assurance, procurement.

In the following report, the most active project delivery method is demonstrated. Further, the best financial contract type is evaluated and recommended. Next, it has approved and assessed the most effective procurement process developed risk management planning along with a quality management plan.

Current Sydney motorway network has included M4 Motorway, M5 East and M5 Motorway. They have been carrying substantial levels of average peak and average hour traffic. This has included high volumes of heavy vehicles. This has been located from western Sydney to and from Port Sydney and Botany Airport economic zone. In the sector of fast growth that has deemed existing roads that have been insufficient regarding a rising in demand and along with the current infrastructure. This has also included widening of current M4 Motorway that has extended from three lanes to four lanes every way. This has spread from Homebush Bay Drive and Church Street. Thus this major project has been a significant undertaking.

WstLINK has set up an integrated team for management for every project participants. This has been composed of WestLINK Engineers. This has also included representative employees from the consultant’s of WestLINK primary consultants. They have developed RFQ or Request for Qualifications and RFP or Request for Proposals. This has been in aid of technical support managers. This integrated management team has also involved project managers, contract managers and traffic management organizers. All of these have been from WestLINK and Maritime and NSW representative. At last, there has been widespread use of performance specifications in RFP and various responses assigned by WestLINK.

Here there have been five significant challenges that are faced by the project. There have been high problems to keep more than about 140000 vehicles that have been moving across the project corridor. They have possessed the speed limit of about 80 km every hour. There has been maintaining of quick-track schedule through keeping expenses. There has been prioritization where the safety of workers and the public through diverting traffic from the Paramatta Road. Further, there has been creating of a unified, cohesive team at management level including various people from an owner, WestLINK and various other agencies. Moreover, there has been a necessity to meet a deadline for 2023. This is done by setting an industry standard for different design-build projects for future. Here for WestLINK, this has been highly significant that their deadline gets met having no cost overrun over government expenses.

Recommendation of a Best Project Delivery Method

Design-Bid-Build:

This recommendation as a result of this is for project owners to use a generic framework. This is developed herein for improving procurement methods selection and capability of decision making. Through establishing threshold unique towards them, project owners can quantify personal ideas biases over different criteria of procurement. Besides, they can compare future projects to that threshold for selecting better procurement methods leading to project success (Kerzner & Kerzner 2017). Here, this specific framework can be developed through further extensions subjecting various projects to this framework. Through polling numerous owners spanning from diverse backgrounds, sectors and expertise in construction sectors, there has been a considerable number of projects that are included in this framework yielding overall industry average for various construction areas. Thus this extension must ass extra advantages to the system, helping project owners to compare future projects that have been against their thresholds (Pritchard & PMP 2014). However, this has been against the limits that have been representing the construction sector where the project has been lying.

Design-Build:

Till the possible extent, APIC CONSULT must be providing flexibility in designing criteria through utilizing performance criteria. This is for encouraging creativity through proposing teams who are design-built through delivering basis to hold the team accountable for project results. This first design inserted to RFP has been not above 30% completed (Monczka et al., 2015). Further, this has included dropping to lower levels as complexity and size with project delivery approach and using various performance-based specifications. Moreover, there has been a rise in experience and expertise among managers of APIC CONSULT. This has been a primary challenge. They should be investing in design-build remaining prior any attempt to perform their initial design-build project. This training has not been including any contracting agency personnel (Jelodar, Yiu & Wilkinson, 2016). However, they have also included consulting engineering and contractors who must be competing to those projects. This useful design-build training sessions must be used for APIC CONSULT for institutionalizing lessons learnt for completed or different active design-build projects.

For this, a quantitative survey can be constructed to gather project data for all of the similar kind of performance areas. This must allow for further analysis for comparing performance metrics instead of schedule and costs.

While cost and schedule are the primary metrics owners are interested in, other benefits from using CMAR can assist them in choosing the delivery system that most fits their project objectives. Again, here another recommendation can be to collect larger DBB projects concerning costs for comparing with the CMAR dataset. APIC CONSULT has made a transition to for every vital project (Naoum & Egbu, 2016). Collection of data over this project would allow for an adequate comparison of schedule and cost for complete distribution of CMAR projects and provide better representation for the performance of the project.

Evaluating and Recommending Best Financial Contract Type

Lump sum contract:

To bid packages of installation and construction and during the process to negotiate and finalize a deal, APIC CONSULT requires review of their work volume within their approved design. As the tender or their bid solicitor finds that their table of work quantity and size has been same compared to design, bid solicitor has been reporting to investment owners for considering deciding on their adjustments (Fernandes et al., 2017).

Guaranteed Maximum Price Contract:

Here there have been various kinds of legal agreements within the world of contracts. Thus here most of them are designed for meeting the necessities of a specific business of any personal arrangements. GMP or Guaranteed Maximum Price have governed APIC CONSULT’s project. Here, this kind of legal agreements has been setting the ceiling or maximum price where entity or amount has been paying for any particular project (Torvinen & Ulkuniemi, 2016). This contractor like homebuilder has been compensated for real costs that are incurred having and specific fee. This is subjected to a maximum amount. Thus APIC CONSULT is liable for their overruns in costs and savings that have been occurring from different cost underruns.

Cost-Plus Fixed Fee Contract:

Any cost-plus-fixed-fee contract has been the cost-reimbursement contract and providing for payment to contractors. This is a negotiated fee fixed at the inception of that contract. Here, the fixed price has been varying with real cost. However, this is adjusted as the outcome of changes for efforts. This has been that has been otherwise presenting too high risks for APIC CONSULT (Kaiser, El Arbi & Ahlemann, 2015). However, this has been providing them only the minimum incentive for controlling costs.

Competitive procurement:

Competitive and efficient procurement processes are the key to find services at best value for money. This is beneficial for APIC CONSULT for pay taxes and users and consumers of their services. Besides, there are specific rules governing procurement where tenders have been carrying and designing those tenders. This has been hindering competition and promoting collusion arrangements. This has been including bid-rigging conspiracies among various competitors of APIC CONSULT.

Negotiated procurement:

Here negotiations with APIC CONSULT have been dependent on different procurement process used. From the procurement method, the ultimate selection can be found out through a sum of the weighted average of financial and technical proposals. This has been cost and quality based selection. This also includes lowest suggested prince among various technically qualified like APIC CONSULT concerning least cost selection (Hawkins et al., 2015). This has involved the reasonableness of financial orders of highest ranked consultants. This selection has been from qualifications same to selecting of individual consultants. Further, there has been least proposed price taking place among technically qualified consultants under any stipulated budgets like the specific fixed budget selection.

Best value procurement:

The conventional procurements processes have been leaving much room to improve risk management along with value creation. Besides, BVP or Best Value procurements has been designed for increasing project values through mitigating different risks and rise transparency through underscoring pre-award stages (K?r?lmaz & Erol, 2017). Here, the paradigm shift has been reached through following various sequences of features with varying guidelines of openness and performing measuring of information and clarifying contractors.

Risk name	Category	Impact	Mitigation	Contingency	Trigger
Legacy interface not working	IT-GUI	Low	GUI expert must be hired who have been working on same kind of projects for writing code in new systems allowing GUI as it was in legacy system.	Writing manual on how to use new interfaces and then train user over that.	Users are unfamiliar with new interfaces.
New system must be allowing users for access old files	Business	High	Running complete testing course with end-users over new system. This is to ensure that it gets compatible with those records.	Accessing backup files over DR servers.	This access has been denied to users.
Slow reaction time	IT-HW	Low	Buying another server that can be controlled with expected user lead of various users.	Rent cloud services that must grant quicker reaction times.	Multiple users has been trying to access that system at a glance.
New systems are unable to get orders from users	Business	High	Creating interfaces that must allow communication between older versions.	Using manual forms for receiving orders	Client calling to get helpdesk.

 

The qualitative management plan for APIC CONSULT has been defining various acceptable quality levels. This has been specifically defined by customers and describing how projects have been assuring level of quality within their deliverables and working process. This quality management has been to ensure that products for APIC CONSULT are created to meet various agreed-on standards and perquisites. Here, various work processes have been done effectively and then documented. Moreover, non-conformances found are to be identified and proper corrective actions are to be taken. This plan is applicable to project deliverables of APIC CONSULT and various processes of project works. Here, the quality control tasks have been monitoring project deliverables meeting various deigned quality standards. Further, quality assurances tasks has been monitoring and verifying process used for managing and creating deliverables followed and effective.

Quality metrics for current qualitative quality management plan:

The following method is useful to optimize structure of measurements. Besides, this metrics has been providing analysis and problem recognition for focusing over qualitative processes. As the identifications of reasons of problems are done the eradication of quantitative methods are used repeatedly for tracking that project.

Conclusion:

The above report is helpful to understand the requirements towards linking time, resources and costs to project framework of APIC CONSULT. This also includes developing of project budgets and forecasts of forecasts. There is also using of expenditure and budget forecasts according to control mechanisms. Moreover, there is proper cost managing methods, capabilities, limitations, outcomes and applications. Further, there are various principles of quality management and application. This has also included quality processes, quality planning, performing assurances of quality and performing controlling of quality. The report helps in understanding how to use quality management systems and processes for APIC CONSULT’s current project. It has demonstrated how risk management planning could be done and proper risk management methods, capabilities, limitations, applicability and outcomes.

References:

Fernandes, A. C., Sampaio, P., Sameiro, M., & Truong, H. Q. (2017). Supply chain management and quality management integration: A conceptual model proposal. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management, 34(1), 53-67.

Garlick, A. (2017). Estimating risk: a management approach. Routledge.

Giannakis, M., & Papadopoulos, T. (2016). Supply chain sustainability: A risk management approach. International Journal of Production Economics, 171, 455-470.

Grudinschi, D., Sintonen, S., & Hallikas, J. (2014). Relationship risk perception and determinants of the collaboration fluency of buyer–supplier relationships in public service procurement. Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, 20(2), 82-91.

Harrison, F., & Lock, D. (2017). Advanced project management: a structured approach. Routledge.

Hawkins, T. G., Gravier, M. J., Berkowitz, D., & Muir, W. A. (2015). Improving services supply management in the defense sector: How the procurement process affects B2B service quality. Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, 21(2), 81-94.

Heldman, K. (2018). PMP: project management professional exam study guide. John Wiley & Sons.

Jelodar, M. B., Yiu, T. W., & Wilkinson, S. (2016). A conceptualisation of relationship quality in construction procurement. International Journal of Project Management, 34(6), 997-1011.

Kaiser, M. G., El Arbi, F., & Ahlemann, F. (2015). Successful project portfolio management beyond project selection techniques: Understanding the role of structural alignment. International Journal of Project Management, 33(1), 126-139.

Kerzner, H., & Kerzner, H. R. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

K?r?lmaz, O., & Erol, S. (2017). A proactive approach to supply chain risk management: Shifting orders among suppliers to mitigate the supply side risks. Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, 23(1), 54-65.

Monczka, R. M., Handfield, R. B., Giunipero, L. C., & Patterson, J. L. (2015). Purchasing and supply chain management. Cengage Learning.

Naoum, S. G., & Egbu, C. (2016). Modern selection criteria for procurement methods in construction: A state-of-the-art literature review and a survey. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 9(2), 309-336.

Pritchard, C. L., & PMP, P. R. (2014). Risk management: concepts and guidance. Auerbach Publications.

Richardson, G. L. (2014). Project management theory and practice. Auerbach Publications.

Torvinen, H., & Ulkuniemi, P. (2016). End-user engagement within innovative public procurement practices: A case study on public–private partnership procurement. Industrial Marketing Management, 58, 58-68.