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CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 40 Current practices for establishing, stating, and communicating requirements and for determining that construction has indeed met these requirements offer many opportunities for mistakes, misunderstandings, and oversights. An essential precondition for assuring construction quality is getting the requirements right, and the committee recommends that federal agencies should continue working to improve their ability to develop facility programs, plans, budgets, guide criteria, design drawings, and specifications that convey the appropriate requirements in a clear manner to the constructor. Agency personnel, private architects and engineers employed by agencies to plan and design specific facilities, and constructors employed under contract to build these facilities all have roles to play in getting the requirements right. Quality is more likely to be assured when these parties work cooperatively toward the common goal of delivering a facility that meets the agency's needs. Agencies should avoid adversarial design and construction management practices and adopt defined programs to foster teamwork among users, design and construction managers, designers, and constructors. The TQM philosophy is a worthy basis for formulating these programs (See Appendix D). THE DESIGNER'S ROLE Architects and engineers who plan and design federal facilities play a key role in determining the quality of these facilities. Both the agencies and their designers should work to assure that the drawings and specifications that present requirements to the constructor are a complete and clear statement of what the owner and user expect in the facility. In those cases where a construction agency other than the user is responsible for administration of the building process, all of these parties must work even harder. The TQM philosophy is an appropriate basis for this effort as well.
