A cost of quality analysis of a building project: towards a complete methodology for design and build

A number of studies have been published that claim to carry out cost of quality (COQ) studies on construction projects. These studies, however, have largely ignored the contribution of prevention and appraisal costs to COQ, and have limited their analysis to the impact of quality failures on the main contractor. This paper presents a methodology for assessing the 'complete' COQ for construction projects and reports on the findings of a building project in the UK on which the methodology was piloted. The company that applied this approach has now extended it to other projects.