Abstract

The Drainage Services branch of the City of Edmonton is responsible for planning, building, operating and maintaining over $8.1 billion of the drainage infrastructure. The environmental monitoring group within the Drainage Services branch has the responsibility of understanding the hydraulic performance of the sewerage and drainage facilities, and assessing how that performance measures up to the goals and objectives of Drainage Services. The Monitoring Group provides monitoring data and reports to the clients. The overall product quality consists of data quality and service quality, which relies on the performance of three major components: staff, device and program. Achieving data retrieval proficiency from monitoring sites and providing an acceptable level of service are of critical importance for the success of the Environmental Monitoring group in Drainage Services Branch. The objective of this thesis is to develop a framework for the environmental monitoring group of the City of Edmonton to establish a Total Quality Management System. It is hoped that, with the implementation of this TQM system, the monitoring group can improve the quality of services, especially in the data integrity, correctness, and completeness. The development of the framework for TQM of the drainage monitoring system is accomplished by applying the methodology of environment-based design (EBD). EBD is the theoretical background for the whole project. It helps to present Recursive Object Model (ROM) diagram and elicit the complete requirements of ideal monitoring system, and then design the quality management system based on the product requirements. In this thesis, the current monitoring process and practices are analyzed, including detailed discussion of the business processes, functional activities, and Operating processes of the Environmental Monitoring Group. Then the ideal process requirement analysis is performed by applying the Environmental Based Design (EBD) model in general and discusses the advantage of this method, presents ROM and the completed requirements. Next, the quality evaluation system is accomplished by setting up the quality standard or performance requirement for each segment of the management of the monitoring process, which helps to evaluate the group performance. Furthermore, the gap analysis is conducted, which presents the gap between the as-is and the to-be status of the monitoring group's quality management performance. Finally, the improvement recommendation is made and the future studies are proposed at the end of the present thesis.