19 January 2016

Costain personnel working on the M60 Manchester Smart Motorways (MSM) project were among those who experienced a week of activities designed to focus attention on quality.

World Quality Day is designed to promote quality as a key component of successful project delivery. However, to highlight the importance of quality, events were expanded to cover an entire week.

The week began with a competition to promote the use of a new Observations Card and to encourage staff to submit ideas to support a ‘right first time’ approach.

Day two highlighted ‘construction fails’ from around the industry and formed part of a poster campaign to raise awareness of possible reputational risks from any failure to manage quality.

Day three focused on clearly communicating performance through infographics in order to support a greater understanding of quality.

The fourth day featured a ‘lunch and learn’ event with a talk from Sellafield nuclear site’s quality and compliance manager Alan Hambling on why the nuclear industry viewed quality as nuclear safety.

The final day contained a round-up of the week’s events and reviewed the response to the Observations Card competition.

“At MSM we have tried really hard to raise the visibility of quality and I believe that by including it as a key component of our ‘virtuous circle of construction’ alongside safety, programme and commercial, these activities have reinforced quality as being equally important,” said Quality Manager Perry Shard.

“We have created a mantra at MSM for quality around PRIDE, or Personal Responsibility In Delivering Excellence and I hope the activities act as a catalyst to achieving this.”

The M60 project is the latest in a series around the country to expand motorway capacity at relatively low cost through measures such as transforming hard shoulders into running lanes during periods of high traffic flow. This is controlled by variable message signs on gantries over the motorway.

Analysis of the first ‘smart’ or ‘managed’ motorway, the M42, shows that journey reliability has improved by more than 20% and the number and severity of accidents has reduced.

The M60 project, which covers 26km of motorway, is led by Balfour Beatty, with Costain, Carillion and a BAM Nuttall Morgan Sindall joint venture being the three other delivery partners.

Work began in July 2014 and is due to finish in summer/early autumn 2017. “We are finishing off verge works at the moment and sheet piling in order to dig the foundations to install the new gantries that will be used to control the smart motorway,” said project Communications Officer Lucy Hingley. “We will be moving into the central reserve in the first quarter of 2016.”

Ends

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