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An article for CONSTRUCTOR, the publication of The Associated General Contractors of America as written in March, 2004. An edited version was published in CONSTRUCTOR’s June, 2004 issue

Driven by Quality

A Partnership of Highway Industry Leaders

The National Partnership for Highway Quality understands all that’s riding on our roads
by Ted Aadland
Company Manager, Wildish Standard Paving dba F.E. Ward
and Co-Chair of the National Partnership for Highway Quality

My friend’s son is a great baseball player. When he was 12, they must have put 100 miles a month on the family car driving him from game to game in their small community. If he were 12 today, my friend’s typical suburban family would be shopping for cheaper car insurance to cover the mileage for all the games that kid would play an hour or more from home. Someone was telling me recently about a guy who’s married to a stockbroker. She kept her job in the city when they moved to a bigger place in the country a while back, and her yearly mileage is already twice what he puts on his car. And here I am, on the Internet, shopping the world for electronics that will be delivered to the office by truck.

Here’s the point: roadways allow us to occupy and benefit from an enormous community. Our communities have grown by a few hundred miles in just the past ten years. There’s no way a modern American family could access the benefits of a major metropolitan area while living on a piece of affordable property in a house with a little breathing room – and shop a worldwide marketplace for the best goods and prices – unless well served by a network of quality roadways.

America’s roadway program is in the midst of a transformation, and mobility is the agent of change. As the engineers, designers, architects, administrators, contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, crafts people, and policymakers of the great American road, we are more than a road gang. We’re the stewards of a new level of access to the American dream. Roadways are as important to modern life as the choice of roof over our head and wheels under our chassis. They’re the backbone of business; nothing goes from store-to-door unless it travels on a road.

The National Partnership for Highway Quality

The quality of America’s roads is a defining quality of American life. Because of that, there are few experiences more rewarding in the construction business than partnering with people who share clarity of purpose and aligned goals for highway quality. Then again, there are few organizations like the National Partnership for Highway Quality (NPHQ), which continues to be the only national organization that brings the expertise of the State and Federal highway agencies and the private highway industry together for the purpose of advancing the quality and service of America’s highways.

Now in its second decade of service, NPHQ gives voice to roadway users on one hand, and to the collective wisdom of the country’s leading roadway professionals on the other. It’s my privilege to serve as the industry co-chair of NPHQ, along with Dave Geiger, P.E., the Director of the Office of Asset Management, for the Federal Highway Administration, and Doug Rose, P.E., the Maryland State Highway Administration Deputy Administrator, for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). Bob Templeton, P.E., is the NPHQ Executive Director. The Associated General Contractors of America was a founding partner, and considers NPHQ’s mission to be so significant that Brian Deery, the Senior Director of the Highway Division, also represents AGC on the NPHQ Steering Committee.

Besides AGC, NPHQ consists of the Federal Highway Administration, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, the American Public Works Association, the American Council of Engineering Companies, the American Concrete Pavement Association, the American Traffic Safety Services Association, the Asphalt Institute, the National Institute for Certification in Engineering Technologies, the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, and the Foundation for Pavement Preservation. By any measure, this is an impressive roster of leaders, all focused on ensuring highways are built to the highest standards of quality.

The Habit of Quality

Aristotle is reputed to have said “Quality is not an act; it is a habit.” In our business, quality means habitually building the customer’s point of view into every aspect of roads and bridges. The habitual application of both innovative and well-established quality principles to the planning, design, construction, maintenance and operation of America’s highways fuels an array of benefits. For the driving public: mobility and safety. For society: prosperity and stability. For agencies: agile responses to customer requirements and fiscal realities. For the workforce: better communications, work processes that make sense, and pride in jobs well done and careers well spent. For industry firms: healthy bottom lines, backed up by widely-reported evidence of how quality leads to increased profitability and efficiency. In quality-managed highway projects, the contractor has more say in producing an outcome that will exceed expectations and garner available bonuses.

Enter the National Partnership for Highway Quality. NPHQ champions continuous improvements to highway organizations, products, services and processes. These include organizational alignment for a collective focus on customers, deployment of quality management principles, and the growth of State Quality Partnerships. NPHQ supports workforce quality training and certification programs and the development of new core training curricula. And in the category of “rubber meeting the road,” NPHQ advocates:

NPHQ also promotes awards for outstanding roadway projects that excel in quality delivered and in customer focus; shares and leverages best practices; and communicates the benefits of the highway quality program to industry, government and the public.

Best Practices and Benchmarking

Peeling back the layers of those last few points—recognizing and sharing best practices and communicating the benefits of quality—reveals hallmarks of a quality culture. Awards and knowledge-sharing inspire change and progress.

NPHQ administers two awards programs to recognize best practices in the highway quality movement. The National Achievement Award and Making A Difference Awards are given in alternate years. They reward agency-industry teams for quality advances that exceed roadway users’ expectations. Winners’ accomplishments are circulated and shared with colleagues who can benefit from lessons learned.

The National Partnership for Highway Quality also hosts, participates in and publicizes quality conferences and workshops that specialize in information-sharing. These opportunities are another engine for evolutions in quality. Legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant once said, “Most coaches study the films when they lose. I study them when we win—to see if I can figure out what I did right.” The Bear had a point. To stay successful it’s good to study best practices, then adjust your game plan accordingly.

The Internet as Process Improver

In NPHQ’s lifetime, the Internet has emerged as a compelling information sharing and process improvement tool to empower and engage the highway community. You’ll find NPHQ partners in the fast lane of the information superhighway. Among other things, they use the Internet to encourage benchmarking and leverage best practices.

For example, NPHQ’s web site, www.nphq.org, details the successes of the public-private teams who’ve earned national recognition through the Making A Difference and National Achievement Award programs. NPHQ partners bestow annual quality honors too, and share winning achievements on their web sites. These include AGC’s Marvin M. Black Excellence in Partnering Awards; the American Council of Engineering Companies Engineering Excellence Awards; and the American Road & Transportation Builders Association’s Globe Awards for environmental stewardship and Roadway Work Zone Safety Awareness Awards.

The Federal Highway Administration’s site, www.fhwa.dot.gov, harbors a wealth of knowledge. An environmental and enhancement site and a safety resources site are two of multiple examples. FHWA also facilitates an online knowledge exchange for collaboration in areas ranging from rumble strips to high performance concrete to performance measurements to asset management.

The American Traffic Safety Services Association serves the roadway safety community with a Technical Assistance Center at www.atssa.com. These are a few snapshots from a much larger collage of how NPHQ partners use the Internet to share best practices, put people in contact with colleagues who are implementing them, collect data, and partner for common solutions.

Green Lights Ahead

In its first ten years, NPHQ partners helped establish the highway quality movement; in its second decade, NPHQ is focusing on State Quality Partnerships. Highway project delivery is a team effort, and SQPs concentrate agencies, consultants, contractors and others on common goals and opens lines of communication. An ambitious goal of NPHQ is the creation of an SPQ in every state, and a recently-formed task force is studying existing partnerships—including the Pennsylvania Partnership for Highway Quality, the Maryland Quality Initiative, the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet Office of Quality, and the New Jersey Quality Initiative. One current initiative is the sharing of SQP foundational elements for modeling by all states.

Another initiative is a higher profile dialogue with highway customers about needs and expectations. We’ve seen time and again how seeking out customer input at all stages of highway projects leads to harmony, quality and teamwork. Here’s an example: North Carolina’s White Oak River Bridge Project, whose project team won a 2003 NPHQ award.

The North Carolina Department of Transportation, contractor (and AGC member) S.T. Wooten Corporation, the town of Swansboro, residents, and local business owners met on Monday mornings throughout the project, for a total of 97 meetings. These were an outlet to voice concerns, especially about the impact on traffic in and around Swansboro. As a result of a steady stream of community input, the project team routinely revised the traffic plan. The contractor even proposed acceleration of the completion date to minimize inconvenience to drivers and businesses. As a result, S.T. Wooten received an additional $559,890 incentive by finishing up by the revised completion date. In point of fact, the contractor delivered the quality product two months ahead of the accelerated date and 14 months ahead of the original schedule by providing additional crews and changing delivery dates and production schedules. The result: minimum inconvenience, backups and construction delays for customers.

Roadway users expect a great deal of their roads. They expect mobility in all its facets: fewer traffic snarls, safer work zones, longer lasting, smoother pavements, and delivery on or under budget and schedule. And they want to participate in the delivery process and stay informed at every stage.

Among other future initiatives, NPHQ will continue advocating innovations that address safety and traffic congestion. Traffic fatalities exceeded 40,000 in 2002. Work zones and traffic volumes have increased, underscoring the need for sound safety solutions. The number of traffic chokepoints in the country has risen 40% over five years.

The good news is that every month, in every state, dedicated workers are finding and adapting new solutions. Just a sampling from recent months: the Virginia DOT’s Highway Safety Corridor Program; the Minnesota DOT’s work zone signage studies; Maryland’s pilot Dynamic Late Lane Merge System for work zones, to help drivers make intelligent merge choices in work zones and avoid abrupt lane changes and sudden stops. These and other innovations save lives and raise quality of life.

Exciting times beckon, as the highway community shares experiences, and discovers better ways to deploy quality. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The years teach much which the days never know.” In the years since the quality revolution, highway professionals have learned a great deal on a daily basis about giving traction to quality principles, managing change and amplifying the voice of the customer.

Future success hinges in great part on how well federal and state agencies and private highway industry firms stick together as partners--in NPHQ, in local State Quality Partnerships, and in the day-to-day partnering agreements among the owners, stakeholders, designers and constructors transforming America’s roadways.

Coach Vince Lombardi put it this way: “Individual commitment to a group effort—that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” His words also spotlight how, through a commitment to the National Partnership for Highway Quality, America’s road builders make mobility work for everyone from a budding baseball player to the business big leagues.