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How QFD can be applied to software and IT projects?
Why QFD is a valuable tool for software development and IT business?
“(Computer and software) Design engineers are usually confident in
their ability and self-content. They believe that customers in the
market ought to buy their products because they develop good products.
When their business does not go well, they say that the cause is
shortage of selling power. On the other hand, marketing people find
reasons in design problems. Thus they make each other at other’s
responsibility and cannot catch problems in many cases,” pointed out a
researcher from Toshiba who presented at the 1998 Symposium on QFD.
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In the paper "Innovative Product Planning and Development
Process," he described that in old days high tech products in
general had longer life and how this was a lifesaver for companies
like his because it allowed them to fix design errors over a time,
causing customers to believe that they did not produce unreliable
products.
“However, the situation is changing dramatically.” He warned
already back then that product life was becoming shorter and
shorter along with the advancement of technologies, leaving no
time for manufacturers to save their face from initial poor
design. The job must be done right the first time. “Now
manufacturers are considering that the most important thing to win
in the market is how to launch products quickly which
satisfy requirements of customers.”
Two common obstacles he cited:
- Typically narrow and slow channels exist between marketing
people and design engineers. In the process, in which the target
specification of the product is transformed into the design
specification, many important concepts are lost, and
inconsistency arises between them.
- The target specification is defined based on subjective
description. It is not rare that even the most critical features
of products are only stated by sets of ambiguous sentences. As
the consequence, the distribution of responsibility and
obligation becomes ambiguous.
To address this weakness in the future product development, his
company sought a solution in QFD.
Dubbed “Super Design Technology,” they established a system of
connecting product planning process with product design process,
with QFD providing a broad, quick, and qualitative channel from
the Voice of the Customer through executable design specification.
They also found QFD served as a design verification and trade-off
mechanism. [1998 K. Noguchi, et. al.]
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Other published cases of QFD application in software and IT field
include a company that used
Blitz QFD® to define and
develop software which tracks and presents anomalies, product
trends, and cyclic outage for many critical computer systems. The
tools and methods used in the project then served as a template
for future software projects for this company.
Some companies have also used QFD to make a software purchasing
decision. In one case study, QFD was used to make the best choice
possible in selecting CAD software for the company, by determining
who the customer was - both internally and externally, what their
needs and requirements were, and matching them to the software
available in the industry.
At the conclusion of one of the above mentioned software
projects, the team concluded:
“QFD is an extremely useful tool for gathering and defining
software requirements. It is a way to translate the customer’s
requirements into the definition and implementation of a
project.
"It provides a means to plan how though the application
of a very organized methodology – one that saves time money, and
resources. This end-to-end process is a useful tool for learning
many important details concerning the way the customers
accomplish their tasks.” [1998 A. Burtner, The 10th Symposium on
QFD.]
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