Design Quality Audits: A Design-Build Claims Avoidance Tool

Design-build (DB) contracts transfer the responsibility for design quality control to the design-builder. Hence, the owner’s role becomes one of quality oversight and its involvement in the technical review of design deliverables becomes very different than in a traditional design-bid-build (DBB) design contract. The speed with which DB projects are delivered puts design approval on the critical path, creating a need to expedite design quality control activities to achieve release for construction (RFC) documents. It also creates a situation where owner-generated comments can result in delay claims. This paper reports the use of design quality audits as a claim avoidance tool and presents a framework for implementing design quality audits. A case study illustrating the implementation of the framework on a large DB wastewater project is presented. The paper’s contribution is showing that the design quality audit allows the owner to perform its due diligence responsibility to monitor DB project quality in a manner that does not usurp the design-builder’s responsibility to produce quality construction documents and avoid becoming the sources of project delay claims. It also finds that design quality issues must be given visibility to facilitate the timely response to and correction of contract noncompliance.

A well-crafted design quality audit program furnishes the DB project owner with a means to satisfy its quality oversight responsibility without disputing the design-builder’s design progress and become embroiled in a contentious and time consuming comment resolution process. To realize the benefit, the audit program framework must be in place before advertising the DB project. The project’s solicitation documents can then refer to the audits and competing design-builders can price and schedule recurring audits in their proposals. After award, the subsequent development of the design-builder’s QMP must address the process for facilitating the owner’s quality audits as a contract requirement. A pragmatic consideration is ensuring that the design-builder’s designer-of-record (DOR) promulgates the contractual audit process down to its design subconsultants and the general contractor include the audit process as part of its construction engineering consultants for the design of temporary works. The key component is to describe the contractual requirements for design quality audits before design-builders respond to the request for qualifications (RFQ) and request for proposals (RFP), giving the design quality audit the same prominence as the other contract administrative requirements that the design-builder must satisfy to be paid.