Generally
Quality management is now being adopted more and more as a primary objective in the construction industry.
This growing measure of perceived important is reflected in the wording of new British standards such as BS 6079, where QM is seen as being a primary responsibility of the project manager, equal in status to cost & time planning & control.
The growing European perception is reflected in documents such as BS 5750, which has now been superseded by ISO 9000. These documents have attempted to establish Europe wide standards of quality that apply across industries and countries.
Quality management has traditionally been seen as being the least important of the classical project management success/failure criteria comprising time, cost and quality and until relatively recently has been neglected as a management discipline.