The New Zealand Institute of Quantity Surveyors (NZIQS) has joined a new global movement established to create international standards in construction measurement.
The International Construction Measurement Standards (ICMS) Coalition was formed earlier this year by non-profit organisations representing construction industry professionals in more than 140 countries.
“We see this as a very valuable initiative in which New Zealand’s construction measurement professionals — quantity surveyors — must play an active role,” NZIQS president Jeremy Shearer says.
Collectively, the coalition aims to create over-arching international standards that will harmonise cost, classification and measurement definitions in order to enhance comparability, consistency, statistics and benchmarking of capital projects.
In an industry estimated to be worth a staggering $15 trillion by 2025, inconsistency in something as fundamental as construction measurement and reporting can create huge uncertainty, misunderstanding and risk.
“Establishing and being able to work with standardised, international guidelines will be good for the local quantity surveying profession, and for the wider New Zealand construction industry as a whole,” Mr Shearer says.
The formation of the coalition marks the first time the global construction, project management, cost engineering and quantity surveying sectors have come together in this way to develop unifying standards which reflect and enhance the increasingly international construction market.
