Advice to Software Firms: Adapt the floor plans to fit your lifestyle

Feature

By Steve Czetli, Contributing Writer

Typically, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is used in the design of complex hard goods, not for creating new software products.  But at Confluence, a small financial services software company, a simplified version of QFD is being used to prioritize market requirements collected from customer observation and on-site interviews.

QFD was first developed forty years ago by Prof. Yoji Akao and an associate at Bridgestone Tire in an effort to diagram the connection between quality characteristics and process characteristics.  Later, for more complex projects, Mitsubishi Heavy Industry's Kobe Shipyards developed a QFD matrix.  That matrix, in turn, was further refined in 1979 by Toyota Auto Body.  Toyota's most noticeable advancement came with its addition of a matrix resembling a rooftop where the "how's" of meeting requirements were put to the top of the diagram, leading to the nickname "House of Quality." QFD has since been adopted as a key tool in the Six Sigma approach to quality assurance.  

But in modifying QFD for software products, Confluence moved in a different direction - simplicity.  The result has made the tools easier to work with and more useful to other software firms.  

At Pittsburgh-based Confluence, the new product process begins with discovery - coming up with ideas. The next phase is scoping - understanding that market with more specificity.  "We go in and build more detailed business cases, but it's not really until the next phase, requirement gathering, that the QFD tool is used," according to Dan Torrens, Vice President Product Management.

Home alterations

"The original idea behind QFD was making multiple Houses of Quality," Torrens said.  "You first had rows capturing the requirements of the customer and then added columns, which were your technical responses to those requirements. For firms creating complex hard goods, what you would do next is rotate the whole diagram and make the effective responses the rows, and the columns become the desired features. So you end up with a new house, a second house. Then after you have the features, you turn it again and create yet another house and map your features to your manufacturing solutions.  But because we don't have a hard goods product, we actually only have to create the house once. So we use QFD and House of Quality, but we don't create multiple houses."

"When we first started getting into the QFD model and using it, trying to create multiple houses - it was cumbersome.  That's when we decided to just create one house and not use the logic and methodology behind the complete QFD process," he continued.

Of course, without good market research, QFD is of little value.

A glut of data

Still, the massive volumes of data brought back to Confluence from studies of its customers created their own problems, and that's where the modified QFD approach proved its worth.

"Pre-QFD, the biggest challenge was taking all that data and prioritizing it," said Torrens. "Because if you are at a client site or if you visit ten clients and they are describing lots and lots of problems and even if you can come up with solutions to those problems, where are you going to spend your most time and effort?  What do you attack first?  How do you know which are the most important problems?  What are you going to put ahead of what? And that's what QFD does for us; it takes all that data and puts it into a structured format so we are able to make informed decisions."

 "Using QFD, your decisions become less subjective.  That's partly because you also add information from competitors, so you are not just folding in what your customers told you, you're also folding in what your competitors have and how they match up to the requirements on your list," according to Torrens.

Make it your home

As for advice to other software firms, Torrens is adamant: the biggest mistake you could make would be trying to follow QFD to the letter.  Instead, he insists, you should modify it to serve your specific needs.

"In our case," he said, "market research involves talking to lots and lots of customers.  Once you do that research, you end up with a lot of raw data. We use QFD as a way to prioritize that data into requirements and take it one step further to make sure those requirements are met by a technical solution."

About the Author:

Steve Czetli is a Contributing Writer for Inside Product Strategy™. He has served as the founding editor and publisher of TechyVent, an online news publication for technology entrepreneurs and business professionals; editor of TEQ magazine; and the business editor of the Pittsburgh Business Times and Pittsburgh Press. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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