Is Quality Part of Your Contract?

My mother passed away in late April. Since then, my sister Jean and I have spent the last few months preparing mom’s 1960s wood framed ranch house for sale. We grew up there, and “going to Fremont” was part of our family routine around the holidays. But the shortage of housing in Silicon Valley has created a hot market for home sales, despite the higher interest rates than many would like, so it is time to move on.

If you have ever undertaken such an endeavor, you will know that painting is a major part of the work. And if you have ever painted beyond simply changing the color in a bedroom, you will know that preparation for painting is 90% or more of the work. The painting part is just the reward for the prep work. Kind of like eating the cake after making it.

During the preparation work, you will ask yourself often, as I did, “is this good enough?” Since painting prep gives you plenty of time to think, I started making correlations to my engineering work. When designing a new structure or evaluating an existing one, when is the effort I am employing “good enough?” An almost endless list of issues could be addressed in different ways, if you really think about it. Do I address each one, or focus on just a subset? How many options should I consider? How many assumptions can I safely make? Every engineer has his or her own standard and individual answer to the “good enough” question.

Before I get to the quality question, I want to make a pitch for the importance of a fair and comprehensive signed contract. If you haven’t gotten to the point in your career when you write and negotiate contracts, trust me on this. It is really important. If you have, you already know. Contracts are basically the vehicle where the parties resolve as many potential misunderstandings and disputes as possible before they actually occur. You can read articles on contracts elsewhere, like those prepared by CASE, but a good contract includes:

But what is missing? A statement on quality!

This brings me back to my painting story. What is “good enough?” How much quality should I provide? Quality, in painting, can be roughly defined as appearance and longevity. It is difficult to specify both exactly. If you have ever painted anything, you will remember asking yourself about quality many times, with increasing frequency, the longer the project takes. Making a statement on quality in structural engineering is equally hard.

Issues that will come up in painting (and corollaries in structural engineering for say evaluating and renovating an existing concrete structure) are:

Back to structural engineering. Unfortunately, most contracts just state that the standard is compliance with the building code. But what does that say about “quality”? Actually nothing, to be frank. Or at best very little, unless you assume that special inspections and structural observations do more than just confirm that the construction matches the design intent of the drawings.

During the design process, quality is infused into the work by the engineer when making design decisions regarding system selection, material selection, connection style, etc. Five engineers could design the same building and come up with five entirely different designs. An expert could rank them based on quality and find that some would perform better than others, despite all of them satisfying the requirements of the building code and the local standard of care.

Most clients will be hard pressed to know the differences amongst the five or likely know what approach the engineer should take when faced with all of the choices to be made amongst alternatives during the design process. But later if a dispute arose, don’t be surprised if the client states firmly that the engineer’s effort fell well short of what was expected and clearly established by “industry standard,” whatever that actually is.

My point is that in engineering work, like painting, you will face the same question: What quality should I provide?

I started off my painting project intending to do a “good job”, the kind of effort I would employ on my own house. Not a slap dash cover-up that I suspect many home sellers do to freshen up a property for sale “as-is.” But I soon realized that my personal “good job” standard was really the way that I have always painted. A painting expert would have to opine on whether I painted like others would under similar circumstances (the standard of care), or whether there was room for improvement with more time and effort, or different techniques.

Engineers do this naturally too, performing the work like they have always done. Every engineer will have his or her own standard and employ different amounts of effort. That standard will be influenced by who they worked with in their developmental years. It should come as no surprise that every engineering firm has a different philosophy on exactness and thoroughness. But ultimately engineering approach translates to fee. And fee implies a certain engineering effort that eventually translates to construction cost, and the number of RFIs and change orders. And at the end to either a happy or an unhappy client.

I am advocating for a conversation with the client about the engineering quality to be employed. Many engineers will find this an uncomfortable conversation, but I will state that any avoidance of communication plays directly into the hands of the client and to the detriment of the engineer. The engineer can be silent on the issue and just do what he or she has always done (personal standard) but the engineer might find oneself losing out on the project because their personal standard is too high. Or being awarded the project and then finding oneself on the losing end of the bargain when a dispute arises, or when the effort normally employed doesn’t measure up to what the client was expecting.

Better to have to this discussion up front, than being silent. Otherwise, you won’t be happy with your painting job. ■