Creative Use of Six Sigma Tools

I am on a path toward certification in Lean Six Sigma; I should probably say further certification since I passed a Green Belt certification exam in November. One of the most interesting aspects of the courses that I am taking is the introduction to a plethora of analysis tools. One such tool is the House of Quality.

A House of Quality is a method to reconcile what customers want with what can be designed. Often referred to as “Quality Function Deployment”, this tool originated in Japan (in a shipyard), and it graphically links customer needs to product capabilities. It also focuses on a competitive evaluation and the best part is the roof – the correlation matrix between desired attributes and what happens when those attributes (Whats) are matched with technical specifications (Hows).

There are plenty of samples of QFDs on the web including this nice description of the tool from the American Society of Quality.

Why does the title of this post include the word ‘creative’? The usual steps or using a QFD model are:

Step 1. Determine customer requirements.
Step 2. Determine the functional or “critical to customer” (CTC) requirements. CTCs must be measurable.
Step 3. Prioritize customer requirements using the following point scale: high/strong (9), medium/moderate (3), and low/weak (1).
Step 4. Complete the correlation matrix.
Step 5. Complete the house of quality with the conflicts and synergies matrix.

In using the House of Quality to chart out some options for implementing KM priorities, I modified the steps as follows:

Step 1. Determine information finding needs (these are the Whats rows))
Step 2. Determine the methods that information needs are currently being met (these become the Hows columns)
Step 3. Evaluate the information finding needs against the methods including an average user capabilities scale: easy to do (9), moderately easy (3), and hard for users (1). Where the how does not correlate with the method what, the cell is blank (less than 1).
Step 4. Complete the correlation matrix.
Step 5. Complete the house of quality with the conflicts and synergies matrix.

The “Benchmarking” part of my modified QFD compares KM, tools including buckets like document management systems.
When you match available methods to the software or platform available (or that you are thinking of purchasing), supporting a business case for change, additional training, adding software capabilities and ranking priorities becomes very visible.