Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan Basic Implementation Steps

Quality assurance surveillance plan is an important plan that is meant to ensure conformance to the performance statement of work.

This plan is beneficial for the clients and government agencies. Because QASP conforms whether the deliverables from contractors are according to the set standards. QASP also ensures that all parties are agree upon while giving the contract or as stated in the performance statement of work.

This plan can serve as basis for inspection before taking the delivery or it can be a series of regular or random inspections.

While agreeing on this plan for surveillance, the frequency of inspections, the standards that will be followed while inspecting and the quality requirements are given in detail.

Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan Stages

Review of Processes, Products, or Services

This involves the inspection of the processes and products or services of the contractors or subcontractors by representatives of the client or government agency.

The entire technical and managerial processes are reviewed to know how the quality assurance systems are implemented in organizations and how effective they are in delivering good quality.

Adherence to Contract

After the review of the entire systems, products or services, the next step in QA surveillance plan is to check whether the products or services conform to the quality levels and requirements of the contract.

If any non-conformance is observed, the same is reported with the help of non-conformance report. Determine the cause of low quality. Find out whether the problem is due to the negligence of the contractor or due to miscommunication from the client / government.

Corrective Action

Based on the results of the inspection, various discussions are held to find the solution i.e. how the products or services can match to the required standards.

All the shortcomings in the products or services are then corrected through proper rework as decided so that they conform to the standards of the government.

Different Methods of Quality Assurance Surveillance

Random Inspections

The client sometimes, performs random inspection to ensure that the contractor follows the right procedures to ensure quality.

For this purpose inspector may take random samples to check whether they meet the specified requirements or not.

The inspectors also follow guidelines as how to select the random inspection lot, how they should be tested for conformance etc.

Planned Inspections

Some inspections are planned with the contractor beforehand while chalking out the quality assurance surveillance plan.

What kind of inspection will be conducted and how it will be done, is also conveyed to the contractor, well in advance.

The best practice is to develop a comprehensive inspection and testing plan.

The outcome of the surveillance is measured against the standard set in performance worksheet.

Customer Inputs

Sometimes, customer inputs are also treated as method of surveillance.

In this case, the client takes inputs from customers on the quality of service provided by the contractor and based on that the performance of the contractor is judged.

Properly documented customer complaints become performance indicator of the contractors work.

100 Percent Inspection

Doing the 100 percent inspection of any work is very rare, since it is a very costly affair. However, in cases of health and safety, it becomes unavoidable.

In summary, quality assurance surveillance plan is the most important document in any contract work since it defines all the requirements that relate to the deliverables of the contractor.

It also makes clear that what is the method of measurement of performance so that there is no dispute later.

This also ensures that there is minimum wastage for the resources for all parties i.e. clients, contractors and subcontractors.