House of Quality Online

Multipurpose Matrix

House of Quality Online — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:36:30 +0000

I have been asked on several occasions what industries Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is useful for. My tongue-in-cheek response to such inquiries is that “QFD is only useful for those industries that have decisions to make and customers to please”. In all seriousness, QFD is about communication and decision making, and its tools can truly be used in any industry. The House of Quality matrix, in particular, is an almost universal tool that can be used for prioritizing anything from a family budget to the complex engineering tasks of an automobile manufacturer.

Speak to Me

The House of Quality matrix is one of the best tools available for clarifying the “voice of the customer”. It is important to note that the customer in question may be a product or service consumer, a corporate executive, or even another department within the same company. In fact, the “customer” in question may even be one’s self–for the HOQ tool is an excellent way to evaluate a complex decision and prioritize one’s own requirements.

Many companies have discovered the importance of asking what their customers’ requirements are. Unfortunately, most companies stop their dialog with their customers at simple requirements gathering. They fail to ask the clarifying questions necessary to truly understand the wants and needs of their customer. The House of Quality tool, on the other hand, helps teams to gather information such as the following:

Are any of the customer’s requirements more important/critical than their other requirements?
How much more/less important is any given requirement when compared to the others?
What are the measurable goals for fulfilling the requested requirements?
Do any of the goals conflict with each other?
Does satisfying any particular goal help to satisfy another?
How difficult will it be to accomplish any given goal?

The House of Quality tool can assist with competitive analysis as well. In short, the HOQ matrix not only helps to capture the voice of the customer, it helps to map an effective and efficient path to satisfying that voice.

What Choice Do I Have?

I mentioned earlier that QFD is only valuable for those groups that have decisions to make and customers to please. I was only half joking when I mentioned those criteria. In order for the House of Quality to be a valuable tool for any team or individual, the people utilizing the tool must be at liberty to influence the decision-making process. Furthermore, teams and/or companies that care little about satisfying the wants and needs of their customers will find little value in the HOQ matrix or the Quality Function Deployment methodology. However, environments that foster micro-management and ignore their customers are generally the product of individual company cultures rather than the attributes of entire industries or disciplines.

Conclusion

The QFD process and the House of Quality tool can be applied in most any industry to increase quality and better meet the needs of its customers. The HOQ matrix can assist in prioritizing the initiatives of anything ranging from computer processor design to hotel management. It facilitates decision making for engineers and sales people, alike. It helps to document the voice of the customer just as easily for healthcare services as for fast food services. In truth, the House of Quality is universally applicable, and probably the only “building” big enough to accommodate all the industries in the world.

The Difficulty Factor

House of Quality Online — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 08:00:55 +0000

I was recently reviewing a QFD that was created by a group of software developers. They had opted to omit several traditional columns, rows and/or matrices, and had added some new ones. On their final House of Quality they had added a “status” column. Many of the top requirements on this HOQ (the list was sorted by calculated importance) had status values of “Prioritized” or “Completed”. However, I noticed that several of the highest ranked requirements had been skipped and had no status at all. I assumed that these items had no status because they had only recently been added to the QFD. However, I soon learned that my assumption was wrong—these items had been skipped because there simply wasn’t enough time left before the upcoming version release to try to bite off such complex or difficult features.

I asked the team how they knew that a given feature was too complex or time-consuming to complete before a scheduled deadline. I was informed that team members were assigned to do some preliminary analysis on top features in order to estimate how difficult it would be to complete them. When I then asked where they logged this information, I was informed that they “just remembered it”. I then asked how they communicated this information upstream to the business stake holders and received some blank stares. When I asked why they had removed the “difficulty” row from their QFD, I was met with questioning glances and the response, “difficulty row?” (more…)

QFD & Agile: Just What the Doctor Ordered

House of Quality Online — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 01:30:48 +0000

Imagine for a moment that you are the president of a successful software development company. Your company is doing reasonably well from a sales perspective, but you have been dealing with some sizable challenges in terms of your development team hitting their scheduled release dates on time. (The past 2 releases have been late by more than six months a piece.) Then one day your development manager comes into your office droning on about the success of something called “Agile” development methodologies. He goes on to tell you that he knows how to eliminate the slippages that he and his team have experienced in relation to your two year development plan: simply do away with the two year development plan. Needless to say, the conversation would probably not go well. However, there is a sweetener that can assist executive management in swallowing the sometimes bitter pill of “Agile” development—and that sweetener bears the name “QFD”. (more…)

Limiting the Flow of Requirements

House of Quality Online — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 00:00:24 +0000

A comment was recently submitted to QFD Online regarding the limits that should be imposed on the number of requirements for any given House of Quality. The basic premise of the comment was that the number of requirements should be limited in order to keep the HOQ “maintainable”. While the core principle was accurate (i.e. that it requires care and attention when crafting a QFD in order to make sure that it can be maintained long-term), the idea that there is a one-size-fits-all limit that can be used is misguided. Luckily, however, there are processes and procedures that can be applied on a case-by-case basis to ensure maintainable requirement lists.

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Which Way is Up?

House of Quality Online — Thu, 31 May 2007 02:00:14 +0000

Have you ever watched a team of engineers modifying their secondary requirements (a.k.a. the “demanded quality hierarchy” or “hows”) on a House of Quality spreadsheet? They remind me of a group of hillbillies staring at a piece of modern art—their heads are usually cocked to the side with grimaced looks on their faces. (It’s quite entertaining actually.) Considering that in a spreadsheet environment secondary requirements are generally edited far more than primary requirements (the primary requirements list or “quality characteristics hierarchy” is usually pulled automatically from other Houses of Quality in the QFD), have you ever wondered why it is that the secondary requirements are the ones that are flipped on their sides and run across the top of the HOQ?

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The Lean Approach to QFD

House of Quality Online — Thu, 24 May 2007 01:30:56 +0000

In 1979, a PBS station in Boston called “WGBH” aired a one-time, 13-part series entitled “This Old House”. Since that time, the program has grown to become one of PBS’s most popular programs, has generated spin-offs, produced a popular magazine, spawned a for-profit website, and even inspired sitcoms.[1] And why has this program been so successful? In my opinion, it’s because people have an inherent love for taking something great, stripping away its faults, and putting it to new found use. That is the same explanation that I use when people ask me about Quality Function Deployment’s resurgence in popularity during recent years. In short, when people ask me why QFD has experienced so much growth in adoption, my answer is simply: “This Old House…of Quality”.

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VOC: Hand Business the Bullhorn

House of Quality Online — Sun, 20 May 2007 00:00:18 +0000

Most people believe that the first step in creating a successful QFD is to identify the list of customer requirements. Although documenting customer requirements is key to ensuring that the “voice of the customer” is heard, there is actually an even more crucial first step. The very first task to complete when creating a Quality Function Deployment is to identify exactly who your “daddy” (i.e. customer) really is, and that task isn’t as easy as you might think.

Numerous QFDs fail (i.e. cease to be used or to be useful) because too many features are added to the relevant product or service in a manner that bypasses the QFD altogether. These assignments are made in a manner that circumvents the system in order to address “urgent” requirements. Unfortunately, as soon as a window is opened for non-customers to push “urgent” matters to the front of the queue, they stop using methodical processes for prioritization altogether. Soon, every pet project or feature gets identified as “urgent” or “imperative”, and the QFD falls to the wayside with the voice of the customer close behind.

This may seem like an easy problem to fix—all that needs to be done is to make sure that these “urgent” items get added to the QFD like every other feature or requirement. If needed, these items can be evaluated and rated before other requirements, but they won’t be worked on until they merit attention. The problem is that many of these urgent items would never warrant attention, according to the QFD, because the wrong customer was identified in the first place.

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A QFD By Any Other Name…

House of Quality Online — Sun, 13 May 2007 00:00:17 +0000

What’s in a name? While Shakespeare may have been correct in observing that “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, most people would not know what you were talking about if you referred to it as a “bee leaf pollen perch”.

Similarly, the name “Quality Function Deployment” gives little hint as to what the tool actually is or what purpose it serves. So why is its name so perplexing? The answer lies in two main issues…

First, “Quality Function Deployment” was originally created by two Japanese professors back in the 1960’s (Drs. Yoji Akao and Shigeru Mizuno). Thus, the process was originally given a Japanese name, which was later translated into English. The original Japanese name, “Hin-shitsu Ki-no Ten-kai”, was translated quite litterally into the name “Quality Function Deployment”. Although the name supposedly carries with it a more intuitive meaning in Japanese, it doesn’t seem to have the same readily apparent meaning in English.

Additionally, the term “QFD” is used by many people today to refer to a series of “House of Quality” matrices strung together to define customer requirements and translate them into specific product features to meet those needs. However, these prioritization matrices were only a small part of the system that Drs. Akao and Mizuno originally created. (See “What is the House of Quality? Why it isn’t a QFD?” at qfdi.org for more information on this topic.) Thus, the application of the term “QFD” has changed over the course of the past 30+ years as well. Even though much was lost in translation from its Japanese name, “Quality Function Deployment” was a much more apropos name for the system of processes originally created by Akao and Mizumo than it is for the derivative tool that it has come to refer to today.