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Developing QFD Objectives

To the left of the QFD objectives in the Big Picture lies an area which reflects the condensation of the six leftmost panels into the objectives, measures and targets of the QFD.

Diligently pursuing the concepts proposed in the Alliance, Role, Vision and Values panels will provide tremendous insight into what your organisation is seeking to achieve - but although the disciplines involved will provide new clarity and many points of linkage and overlap, the resulting picture is likely both to be complex, and to have a number of unresolved 'loose-ends'. Additionally, not all of the insight will be explicit - some will be tacit; wrapped up in people's attitudes and underlying paradigms.

The tools reflected in the image on the right are focused on helping to pull together all the various parts of the picture - to reconcile objectives 'from' different stakeholders, to articulate the hidden goals and assumptions, and to build real consensus and commitment to the conclusions:

The Affinity Diagram enables a group of people to pull together a complex picture, generated from a range of different sources, into a logical framework which simplifies and clarifies what is important. For the purposes of Organisational QFD, we would generally propose something along the lines of the following process:

1. Immerse the team in the findings of the six leftmost panels in the big picture: shared objectives with partners; alliance opportunities; organisational values; the vision of the future; the core role of the organisation (customers, market, competition); key levers (people, resources, structure, ...) - perhaps by means of some summary or reflection exercises to fully engage their thinking and observation.

2. Invite them to summarise what they think the organisation needs to achieve (in a set timescale) based on that, and to write this clearly and succinctly onto separate sticky-notes. It may be useful to limit the number per individual to drive focus: 'your personal view of the ten most important things we need to achieve or sustain'.

3. Get them to stick them on a wall, and to read and understand each others sticky notes (rewriting them where necessary to ensure they are clear and unambiguous). Keep asking questions until everybody clearly understands all of the sticky-notes.

4. Explain the rules of the affinity diagram, and invite them to move individual post-it notes in silence. Watch as patterns emerge and get changed (be strict on enforcing the rules), keeping everyone fully engaged until the pattern settles down (with maybe two or three areas of contention playing ping-pong).

5. Depending on how many groups emerge, you may need to encourage them to break groups apart into more detail, or to bring other groups together - your goal is to have the same number of groups as your organisational QFD will have objectives (ideally 5-10)

6. Resolve the areas of contention by discussion (it is usually based on differing assumptions) and then work through each group, giving it a name (a phrase which will make a good objective statement) that summarises all of the sticky notes contained within the group.

Measures and Target Setting are used to further clarify the objectives (perhaps developed by means of the affinity diagram above).

In practice, developing measures can be very contentious, and so we tend to split the group into syndicates to develop measures for different (sets of) objectives, and lay down very clear guidelines. Basic guidance on developing measures is available from two main sources on this website: Pages 30-32 (Chapter 2) of How to Build a Better Business, and a basic guide to measurement (652 KB).

Our preferred approach to target setting is the clothesline technique, which is a dynamic consensus reaching approach using team members stood along a number line to reflect and debate their changing position as they are swayed by other people's insights and arguments. A very brief explanation of the clothesline can be found in Chapter 7 (Page 100) of Managing by Design, and a more complete process is outlined in pages 33-36 (Chapter 2) of How to Build a Better Business

A slide deck (143 KB) for measures and target setting is available on this website, by clicking the highlighted link.

Scenario Evaluation is a sophisticated way of developing an understanding of the relative importance (weighting) of your objectives. A standard approach to weighting is included in pages 37-38 (Chapter 2) of How to Build a Better Business, but this approach, while simple and relatively quick, can lead to an overweighting of the less important objectives.

The alternative is to use a forced comparison technique, which can be applied to individual objectives, but is far more powerful when applied to combinations of objectives in complementary scenarios of possible outcomes. This technique has been used succesfully in weighting product features in customer workshops, and is known as Customer Preference Modelling (a combination of paired comparisons and Taguchi) but the same approach can be used with the board of an organisation to understand their preferences for the objectives. This is very powerful, because in arguing for one scenario over another, people have to wrestle very deeply with their thoughts, basic assumptions are drawn out, implications are understood, and consensus is more powerful.

Because of its dependency on maths (software), Tesseracts' version of the Scenario Evaluation Tool is not yet ready for general distribution through this website (currently it needs a level of expertise/training to operate it) but if you would like to understand more, please feel free to contact us