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QFD Guidance

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  • June 17, 2005 at 3:06 pm #39759

    EdG
    ★ 10 Years ★
    Participant

    This may be a simple question but here goes…
    I was given a QFD by a team that spent a day developing it and saw the following;

    Six entries for Expectation (WHAT)
    Sixteen entries for Parameters (HOW)
    >70 high (strong) relationships
    <20 low or medium relatinships
    a few none
    Based upon the results, virtually everything is a priority to focus on!  When I saw this my first reaction was, “this can’t be right.”  Everything can’t be the most important thing.  My initial reaction was there should be some semblence of a normal distribution between the high, mediums, and  lows but I am uncertain if that is correct.
    Does anyone know if there is a rule of thumb for the H/M/L (strong, medium, weak) realtionships?  I can’t believe that 76% – H, 9% – M, 8% – L, and 7% None is a reasonable result.
    A little guidance from the experts would be appreciated.  Thanks.
    EdG

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    June 17, 2005 at 3:13 pm #121675

    AMU
    ★ 10 Years ★
    Participant

    EdG, Why dont you try the QFD activity with a different team again, if your sure that the results arent right?
    Also, I hope the results of this QFD is alteast after doing a 3-4 levels of  QFD… If not drill it down again.
     
    Rgds
    AMU
     

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    June 17, 2005 at 3:26 pm #121678

    EdG
    ★ 10 Years ★
    Participant

    I’m not saying that they were wrong but it just didn’t initially seem reasonable.
    When I talked with some of the team members they assured me that they only put the factors that were the most substancial (there were more than the 16 originally).  My answer was, “but some of these Highs must be high-high, medium-high, and low-high.  right?”
    When I first looked at the results I kept hearing John Shook in the back of my mind saying “If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.”  Hence why I thought I should ask for some further guidance.
    Thanks…

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    June 17, 2005 at 4:15 pm #121683

    BTDT
    ★ 10 Years ★
    Participant

    EdG:Your feelings are in the right direction, the object is to have the best discrimination, not an absolute score.I use a rule-of-thumb that about 1/4 are Low(=1), 1/4 are medium(=3), and 1/4 are high(=9). Not all squares have to be filled in (=0).Filling out the QFD can be done quickly using voting in a group. We have about 15-30 seconds of discussion per item and then a “1-2-3-vote” with a show of fingers for L/M/H. If discussion goes longer, then we ‘park’ the item and go on with the rest. We find less than 10% of items get parked.The last time we did this it took about 30 minutes to make 200 decisions.The importance of each of the Whats down the left hand side are ‘force ranked’ by asking the question, “Out of these Whats, which of these is the MOST important (=10)”. “Of the ones remaining, which is the MOST important (=9)”. It is difficult and rare to get two items to be exactly the same.BTDT

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    June 17, 2005 at 4:33 pm #121686

    Iain Hastings
    ★ 10 Years ★
    Participant

    EdG,
    Some simple rules of thumb do exist for checking a HOQ.
    It looks like you have a total of 96 cells of which only 7 (or so) are empty. This may mean that there is a problem with the hierarchy of the WHATS or the HOWS. As you have only 6 WHATS this would not be surprising. You may need to take another look at the Expectations and Parameters and see if they should be broken down to lower levels.
    Another issue may be that the expectations include reliability, cost, safety etc. If so you may want to re-assess these and see if they should be analyzed seperately.

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    June 17, 2005 at 4:40 pm #121687

    Michael Schlueter
    ★ 10 Years ★
    Participant

    Hi EdG,
    You are right, in my view. A couple of questions:

    was the customer a team member (if not, how to decide about importance of WHATs)?
    has there been benchmarking on the WHATs (this can help crosschecking the WHAT-information)?
    are the WHATs in balance (i.e. is one a top-level, while another one is sub-sub-sub-level information)?
    is there 1 specific HOW-measurement for each WHAT (there can be more, but at least there should be 1)?
    have the HOWs been benchmarked (same as above)?
    does the team visualizse information like WHAT: low-fuel consumption, HOW: fuel-consumption; if so, this is too narrow and probably does not reflect VOC in WHAT, i.e. customers value.
    Hope this helps. Michael Schlueter

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    June 17, 2005 at 4:47 pm #121688

    BTDT
    ★ 10 Years ★
    Participant

    EdG:Iain makes a good point. Consider adding more WHATs.When we were filling out our QFD, there was some discussion about the ‘training’ column that gave us difficultly because it was so vague. We changed the column to something like, ‘tracking which people have taken which training modules’ and a second column, ‘effective training modules’.We also added another row, ‘cost of implementation’ when we started getting a lot of push back with the results. This opened up the Pandora’s box of internal(VOB) vs. external(VOC) customer needs.We eventually combined both groups after getting sponsor buy-in about the relative importance of the internal vs. external customer.BTDTVOB – Voice of the businessVOC – Voice of the customer

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