| Read the "House of Quality" article by Hauser and Causing, located at the following URL: www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005RZ1Z/104-1647300-7414354?v=glance&n=551440 After reading the article, you should be prepared to discuss the following: | 1. | "What's so hard about design." Discuss the barriers and obstacles to understanding what customers really want. Are cross-functional teams the answer? What does QFD offer to help cross-functional teams? | | 2. | "Building the house." Customer attributes are phrases customers use to describe product characteristics. Distingish true customer needs as opposed to mistaking product characteristics for customer needs in new product development (that is, not upgrading an existing model). | | 3. | "Building the house." The row items are described as whats and the column items as hows. In software development, at the end of the analysis phase a functional specification is supposed to contain the whats and the design spec is supposed to contain the hows reflecting the decisions made during design. So the "House of Quality" matrix would then connect the analysis and design phases. Is this necessary in software development? What about the inputs to the creation of the functional spec? Can the "House of Quality," as described here, be of any use at the front end of the development process? | | 4. | "Using the house." The roof "matrix" for the car-door example claims that the engineering characteristics of "peak closing force" and "door seal resistance" have a strong negative relationship. For which type of car-door design is this true? Discuss at what point in the development process a designer decides on a design, and therefore whether engineering characteristics conflict. When can you finish the "House of Quality" matrix by completing the roof matrix? | | | | 5. | "The houses beyond." The linked series of houses convey the customer's voice. But this example was completed at a time when car-door suppliers built to car company specifications. So the four houses explore only the decisions open to the door supplier, and redesigning the door is not one of them. Discuss the danger of using a QFD model tailored for parts suppliers as a general model for QFD, especially for software development. |
The "House of Quality" article is also available from the following three sources: Hauser, John R., and Don Clausing. "The House of Quality," Harvard Business Review, Vol. 66, No. 3, MayJune 1988, pp. 6373. http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml;jsessionid=RUL5ABFLWLQLUAKRGWDSELQBKE0YIISW?id=88307 Reprinted in The Product Development Challenge, Kim B. Clark and Steven C. Wheelwright, Eds. (Boston: Harvard Business Review Book, 1995). Reprinted in IEEE Engineering Management Review, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring 1996. Translated into German and published in Hermann Simon and Christian Homburg, Kunderzufriedenheit (Gottingen, Germany: Hubert & Co., 1998).
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