The effect of Quality and Selected Standards on the Safety and Convenience of the Occupants in the Building Projects of Addis Ababa
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Date
2018-06-09
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The Study is about the effect of quality and selected standards on the safety and convenience of the occupants in building projects of Addis Ababa, specifically focusing on three standards in particular, access to the physically challenged, emergency exits (means of egress), and sufficient parking lots for the occupants of the building. Standards and regulations are few of the inputs to quality planning; the project aims in identifying whether standards and regulations are considered when designing the buildings in Addis Ababa, and check if quality is planned not inspected in. The study plans to find out where the gap exists and why the aforementioned standards aren’t being included in the buildings of Addis Ababa, to help further constructions would be built with the standards making the city’s buildings safe and accessible. The participants of the study are registered members of the Ethiopian Consulting Engineers and Architects Association consulting offices. The number of the population is 42, with a sample size of 36. The participants were selected by using simple random sampling technique, using the lottery method. The method of analysis used is mixed method; both qualitative and quantitative are used. To assess the effect of state of quality standards in the city’s buildings, a questionnaire was distributed to thirty six engineering consulting offices and a semi structured interview was held to assess the problems they face. The results reveal that there is no significant gap in the designing stage but the standards don’t get implemented for different reasons, among these reasons, the city’s administration lack of consistent regulation and clients of the property asking a revision of a design in the process omitting the standards in the process. 47.2% of the firms have quality control department, while some consulting offices claim even though it is not structured as a department the work still gets done by other personnel. The offices have disclosed there are multiple reasons to which they have a problem in incorporating the standards, amongst the reasons that most participants mentioned are, clients manipulating the gap created by the responsible body to get maximum functional area, inconsistency of directives used by the permit issuing authority time and again, space limitation provided by the city administration, inappropriate conduct of the permit issuing officer are the few. The study’s recommendation is, as the standards exist in the directives as well as in the occupancy permit check list, but the problems still exist, to involve stakeholders (users of the buildings) involvement in giving the occupancy permit process.
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Keywords
Quality, Standard, Quality planning