National Occupational Standards in
Archaeological Practice

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AJ7 Oversee project costs, quality and progress

AJ7.2 Oversee project against agreed quality standards

Performance Required

This will involve:

1. ensuring that quality standards are correctly specified and responsibilities for maintaining compliance are in place and understood by interested parties
2. ensuring that systems for inspection and recording the progress of the works are in accordance with contracted undertakings and appropriate to the complexity of the project and quality standards demanded
3. ensuring that inspection reports are completed to the agreed schedule
4. identifying work which fails to meet required standards and advising on appropriate corrective action in accordance with the terms of the contract and your terms of appointment
5. identifying works and activities in breach of statutory and legal requirements and referring these promptly to interested parties in accordance with your own contractual and legal obligations
6. where appropriate, and within the terms of your appointment, recommending relevant amendments to specified quality standards
7. recording and notifying the employer and contractor of any failure to remedy unacceptable standards or to respond appropriately in a given time to requests for remedial action

Occupational Context

1. Quality standards include:
   • statutory requirements (including scheduled monument consent, CDM)
   • project specifications
   • manufacturers / suppliers instructions
   • certification authorities (e.g. BSI, ISO)
   • Codes of Practice
   • advisory guidance and best practice
2. Means of ensuring quality:
   • visual inspection
   • comparison with specifications
   • contractors reports
3. Interested parties
   • employer
   • contractor
   • suppliers
   • statutory and regulatory authorities

Knowledge Requirements

You need to know about:

Quality control systems

• Types of quality control system employed by contractors and clients
• What types of quality control systems are appropriate to projects of different scale and complexity

Quality inspection

• Methods and techniques for verifying compliance with quality standards
• The archaeologists duties and responsibilities under CDM regulations
• Sources of expert advice and support on quality assessment and control

Quality control

• Strategies for achieving improvements in quality control during work in progress
• Implications of varying quality standards within the contract

Required Skills

You should demonstrate:

• How to apply quality control systems
• How to assess compliance with quality control standards
• How to take corrective action where quality standards are not being met

Evidence Required

You should provide evidence that you can oversee project against agreed quality standards

The candidate should be questioned, based upon the documentation provided, to explore how they:

• ensured that quality standards and responsibilities for maintaining compliance were met
• ensured that inspection reports were completed to schedule

Evidence Rules

The candidate should have been involved in at least 2 substantive projects.

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Today's date: 4/2/2012
This page last updated: 6/8/2007 10:58