The Q: Building a Room Around Quality

Sep 14, 2026

What is the Q?

We’re so glad you asked.

Walk into an RO mission critical trailer and you’ll find a room, marked simply “The Q,” built around a single idea: put the right people in front of the same information, and better decisions follow.

“The Q is a great idea that we developed to create a physical space and encourage collaboration and teamwork. Putting people together in the same room, analyzing the same information, and coming together with some decisions that are going to create positive outcomes on the job,” said Graham Merriman, Senior Vice President, Mission Critical

The setup is deliberate. There’s a couch, multiple screens, and project information ready for review. When an owner wants to see where things stand, the team pulls up the drawings or plans in question and walks through them, usually over a cold Topo Chico.

Why quality gets its own room

Behind the couch and the screens is a process. RO runs a three-phase inspection on the work: a preparatory phase before it starts, an initial phase as it begins, and follow-up inspections as it continues. The Q is where that process lives. It’s also where two of RO’s values meet.

Stronger Together and Own the Outcome share a room here, because quality is never a solo mission.

“If there’s any issues that might arise, we’ve got a space that we can dedicate to fixing that issue before it actually becomes a problem,” said Mason Harwell, Project Engineer

None of that happens unless people are willing to raise their hand. The Q is built to lower the stakes on asking.

“The Q plays an important role in the quality process because it allows for people who might not feel so comfortable asking quality questions….to know it’s one of those ‘no question is a dumb question’ type of environment,” Megan Thomas, Assistant Superintendent.

The same openness extends to the people outside the RO team. Owners and trade partners are in the room too.

“I think that the Q is really a welcoming space for the owners to see that we’re all in this together. We’ve got the same game plan,” Harwell said.

The journey to The Q

Quality has been RO’s throughline since engineers Steve Rogers and Pat O’Brien founded the company in Dallas in 1969. The discipline behind it was sharpened on our most demanding, zero-tolerance work, where specifications ran far tighter than typical construction and mistakes weren’t an option. That’s where RO went all in on Total Quality Management and Philip Crosby’s “Zero Defects” method: getting it right the first time, catching problems before they happen, and measuring the cost of getting it wrong.

That mindset still sounds like RO today. RO’s pursuit for predictable outcomes is wrapped into a quality process that ensures that mistakes on one project should never be repeated on the next, and that continuous improvement is possible.

“It was in response to being really emphatic and intentional about quality, and creating a space that lets not just our team know, but our owners know and our trade partners know that this is really important to us. And every time you’re in the trailer, you’re going to see how important it is to us,” said Merriman.

The next step for mission critical work

Data centers and MEP-heavy builds move fast and carry enormous complexity. Dense systems, constant coordination, exacting standards. The Q takes RO’s decades-old quality discipline and gives it a home built for that pace, and it’s where quality is headed on our mission critical sites.

The Q is one of the ways RO makes sure the work lives up to the name Texas’ Premier Builder.

Quality doesn’t happen by accident, and it takes a team that cares about getting it right. We’re looking for more people who do.

See where you fit at r-o.com/careers.