The reality is that most projects have only enough resources to deliver a few customer needs. How can we deliver what matters most and keep the development time under control? Two time-saving techniques have been developed in the U.S. in recent years by QFD Institute and Richard Zultner. One such method is called Blitz QFD®.

In addition to the traditional product development following critical path, Blitz QFD® also follows Essential Path, focusing on value discovery based on the recognition that some tasks may not be on the critical path but could be far more value-adding than others. Blitz QFD® consists of seven steps, several important tables, two diagrams, a mathematically sound prioritization method, and no House of Quality table. Among its tools are Customer Voice Table, Maximum Value Table, etc.

The concept and initial application results reported in 1997 at the 9th Symposium on QFD demonstrated how Blitz QFD® empowered companies to deliver the maximum value for the effort invested, while shortening development time without increasing risk. The method is taught in the QFD Institute's QFD Green Belt® Certificate Course.

It sometime happens that a bias develops where some departments insist that their projects are more important than others and they demand not only that their projects be given immediate attention, but also that the most senior people be assigned to them. This could deprive other departments of resources needed for their tasks and cause unexpected operational gaps that affects the company's overall performance.

To better utilize resources, it makes sense to prioritize projects based on their benefit contribution to internal and external customers, as well as to assign skill- appropriate people to work on them. A major bank in the U.S. has applied QFD to help them identify and prioritize the needs of their customers. They then used these findings to evaluate each project for its benefit contribution and for the degree of complexity needed to determine the appropriate level of resource assignment for the project.

The presentation at the December 2003 Symposium showed the development of their internal customer needs that were used for determining project benefits, development of another set of criteria used for judging project complexity and required technical skill levels, and more importantly, customization of QFD that rendered optimization and real power to this bank's product and business development process in line with their organizational goals. The presentation included charts and defining the process.

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Two common problems exist: Frequent specification changes and engineer-biased Voice of Customer data. They are seeds for future risks because these problems lead to inconsistency in required specifications, higher maintenance cost, and eventually inefficient software performance in the future.

A team of software engineers from the Toshiba Software Engineering Center in Japan has proposed a Software-FMEA method based on the QFD processes, to ensure the maintainability and fail-proof future expansion of new software being developed. It enabled a software development team to analyze both functional and non-functional requirements so that they can reduce future risks that might otherwise occur and become costly. The proposed method also addresses the Voice of Managers (VOM), in addition to the traditional Voice of Customer.

Kansei Engineering