Quality Function Deployment

I truly am fascinated with the modifications that engineers and analysts have been made to the House of Quality matrix. The addition of concepts such as “dependencies” is evidence that just like products or services, methodologies need to be continually refined in order to ensure their usefulness. In short, remodeling in response to the voice of customer leads to greater value.

QFD Online recently announced the beta release of their online “QFD Builder” software. This software is browser-based and allows users to create sequential (i.e. inter-connected) Houses of Quality online.

An HOQ can quickly become unwieldy or cease to be useful if requirements are added to it haphazardly or if essential requirements are omitted. Luckily, there are proven guidelines that can assist QFD teams in producing a well-groomed and comprehensive Quality Function Deployment model.

If cost, complexity, and/or difficulty will affect your prioritization, then before you decide that entering difficulty values is too laborious, perhaps you should instead ask yourself, “how hard can it be?”

When people ask me why QFD has experienced so much growth in adoption, my answer is simply: “This Old House…of Quality”.

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…

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”.

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.

If you are looking for a way to simplify your QFD process, you just might find that changing the direction of your headings may get you heading in the right direction.