CONQUAS Systems Standard for High Quality Project Management

In spite of the proliferation of the activity, construction management is not a much studied or systematized subject. There are still only pockets of excellence in a sea of seat-of-the-pant and ad-hoc working. Most second level construction firms do not have systematic recording, documenting, planning and quality control procedures. While the tier-1 firms have evolved and practice sophisticated systems based on advances in civil engineering and project management, the others are not yet ready to embrace modern practices. The BCA (Buildings Construction Authority) Singapore made efforts to bring some order into the entropy. They codified a simple construction management process which could be easy to adopt by the second and third tier construction companies too. This system is named as CONQUAS, which has been in vogue since the late eighties. Beginning with Singapore, it has spread to the rest of Asia. Larsen and Toubro is an Asian giant corporation. A division of this company, after a lot of study, thought and discussions, decided to adopt the CONQUAS method of construction management. This paper describes how these efforts have borne fruit and the company is planning to adopt the system in more projects.