National Occupational Standards in
Archaeological Practice

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AK1 Maintain compliance with archaeological requirements

AK1.3 Control project against agreed quality standards

Performance Required

This will involve:

1. summarising appropriate quality standards accurately from available information in an appropriate style and format and communicating to interested parties
2. identifying and verifying individual responsibilities for maintaining quality standards
3. identifying specifications which conflict with statutory and legal requirements and referring these to interested parties for modification
4. checking materials regularly for conformance with specified requirements
5. checking working methods and the utilisation of materials for conformance with specifications and quality standards
6. identifying and recording work which fails to meet required standards and advising on appropriate action
7. agreeing relevant amendments to project quality requirements and specifications with interested parties and recording accurately
8. recording failures to respond appropriately and in a given time to written requests to remedy unacceptable standards and notifying interested parties

Occupational Context

1. Quality standards include:
   • statutory requirements
   • project specifications and conditions
   • Codes of Practice
   • best practice
2. Means of verifying quality
   • visual inspection
   • comparison with specifications
   • comparison with standard documentation
   • contractors reports
3. Working methods
   • relating to health and safety
   • relating to co-operative activity
   • relating to recognised methodology
   • relating to strategic planning
   • relating to shared common goals
   • relating to deliverable outputs
   • relating to specific targets
4. Amendments
   • in / decreasing extent of regulation: in / decreased measurement, more / less deliverable targets, etc
   • changing authoritative structures
   • changing monitoring and evaluation processes

Knowledge Requirements

You will need to know and understand

Quality Standards

• Statutory and legal requirements
• National / local / organisational
• Archaeological / externally contractual

Archaeologist's relationship to the quality standards

• In terms of authority
• In terms of supervision
• In terms of responsibility
• In terms of accountability

Methods and Measures for control

• Systems for verifying quality
• Monitoring and evaluation data
• Inspection
• Feedback loops and reporting mechanisms

Required Skills

You should demonstrate:

• Communication and people skills, including difficult situations such as dealing with failures to respond to written requests to remedy unacceptable standards

Evidence Required

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

The candidate should be questioned, based upon the documentation provided, to explore the following

• Records of inspecting and recording work
• Records of conflicting specifications

Evidence Rules

The candidate should have been involved in at least 2 contrasting sites.

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Today's date: 31/7/2010
This page last updated: 27/7/2007 16:17