This is a short transcript of a YouTube interview (Jan 11, 2026) where Christopher Parsons and a guest discuss how AEC firms use feedback from construction administration (CA) and quality assurance (QA) to identify training topics. The guest describes a CA grading exercise that tracks 16 categories (with an open comment field) and uses a specific handoff question whose low score (around a C, some D+ responses) motivated creation of a handoff checklist. Their QA system grades the same 16 categories, records process metrics (e.g., sheets per review) and derived guidance ("18 minutes per sheet" for a CD set), and tracks consultant performance so principals can choose higher-rated consultants. Data from these loops feed annual reports, firm training sessions, and targeted interventions (e.g., phone calls to underperforming consultants).
Chapters
My recollection of the story is you were spending time with the CA team and they were seeing the same issues show up over and over and over again in drawings. And that led to landmark learning, and that drove the kind of curriculum as you were developing it. Now that we're almost a decade in, is that still the mechanism that's like, here's what we're going to teach in 2026. It's I'm going to CA and spending time with teams and figuring out where the issues are. Is that kind of method of topic identification changed at all in that. In that run?
I would say it's changed in that it's morphing. We're trying to make sure we have feedback loops. So, you know, I can go to the construction administrators and ask them what's going on. And we do. So as a matter of fact, we just got done with our. We call it the CA grading. So to keep it simple for that group, I just ask them to give us a letter grade. You know, give us a letter grade on how we're doing. And we track 16 categories. And then we always have one extra question in there. This here. Our question is, how are our teams doing in handing off projects to ca? Give them a letter grade. Now, the reason I do that is because when I go and report out to the firm on how we're all doing in our annual report, I like to use that question as a segue into something. So we had already identified that this was problematic. So we are generating and putting together a checklist for handing off a project to the construction administrator. So I'm going to talk about it and say, this is the reason why we're doing it. We're getting a C in this. So we created this checklist to help you teams do this.
You were getting a C in handoff from the CA team.
So they're ranging from D plus to.
C. Did they give you more qualitative feedback? They're like, this part's working well. Okay.
Yeah, yeah. So in there, they can also put commentary in. So it's always nice to go in and do the annual. Within the BWBR forum, which is our noontime thing, I go in there and we go through all the 16 categories, and I throw in some of the more interesting comments in there, good or bad. If we're doing really well, I want everybody to know where we're doing well. But if we're failing somewhere or not doing as well, I want to have that going on. It's actually a relatively popular Session people like to go to it and, you know, in there we also give the opportunity for any CA person who was in attendance to expound a little bit on why they said that or talk about it a little bit more as well. Now, to create the loop, though, you have to be able to check that against something. So within our vantage point system, we have quality assurance tracking. Now we ask our quality assurance reviewers to grade the exact 16 categories. Our mechanical electrical coordination. Good. And we track that data. It gives us a number of different things. Same questions for all projects, Same questions for all projects. But for the quality assurance, we also are allowed to track other things, like how many sheets came in, how long did it take? So we have questions all the time that come to us and say, well, how much time should I schedule for a quality assurance review? Well, I can tell you right now that if you have a CD set, you need 18 minutes per sheet. And that's based on the data that we have that we can tell you how much time you need in there. But in addition to that, we can also track. And I can tell you which of our consultants are good and which of them are bad. And we let our consultants know that we're tracking their performance. And the ones that maybe are underperforming, they get a phone call from me, and we talk about it and we say, why?
And is that based on feedback from the, from the CA team, or is that from the project teams as well?
The CA team and the quality assurance? I mean, it's where the rubber meets the road, right? When they send drawings over, if these drawings are trash, you can see that if they're consistently behind us. And so I oftentimes have principals come to me and say, hey, I've got these three proposals for these three mechanical electrical firms. Which one is best? I can tell them, so we can cut it by market. So maybe it's healthcare, maybe it's S and T, maybe it's higher ed. But some firms are better at things than others. So I can tell them which ones are the highest rated in the market that they're looking at. So we track all of that to make sure that we're giving the best data to the principals to make educated decisions when they're selecting their consultants as well.
So when you said there's kind of like a feedback loop, that's partly the CA team kind of grading the delivery of the, of the CDs, essentially. And, and then that is informing what you're going to teach the next year because you're wanting to like level those scores up.
Yeah. So the quality assurance scores that are in the same categories, you can compare them against each other. And it's amazing when you do the CA grading and you're looking for comments, it's kind of shocking how many of the CA people have the same grades and very similar comments. And then when you get to qa, again, very similar. They track the same. And then we also incorporated proposal request tracking. So what are we changing out in the field? What are we issuing change orders for? So we have those again in the same 16 categories. So that you can see, okay, here, here's right before we issued. What was the problem out in the field being built? What was the problem? What are we changing in the field? So we have these three items that you can compare against each other. And when you compare that data, there are things that come to the top all the time. So that is what we're using to inform what we're going to be talking about. So when we're talking about a process and especially how to put a building together, that's where a lot of that content comes from. We also have a workshop every year. We simply ask everybody who is in there, what do you want to learn about? You know, that's where we came up with a lot of the soft skills. For this year's last year's workshop, people wanted to learn about soft skills. They wanted to know, how do I have that difficult conversation with a consultant, with a co worker, with, you know, something like that, how do I make rough decisions? How do I do all these things? So we said, okay, let's lean into that and start teaching those subjects as well. So there's the data, there's what do you want to learn about? But also there are things that we go backwards and say, we need to pull this out, dust it off, and do it over again. So we have, we have those three kind of categories that, that inform what we're going to be working. Sam.
