Requirements Mapping

Requirements mapping is an approach for organising the design priorities, trade-offs and benchmarking. The House of Quality is a way of organising and comparing the design requirements and the TPMs. By going through this process, we begin to see the important parts of the design and - more importantly - the relationships between the parts.

Glossary

The vocabulary around requirements is wide, varied and interchangeable. There is no right or wrong usage, as each use of\ language is likely to be slicing the system in different ways. See an example of the different vocabulary on the right.

Steps

Building a HoQ is an iterative process, and will keep evolving. It’s a useful tool to track changes in a project, and good version control is important.

  • list the design requirements an the left of the table, and the design attributes along the top of the table
  • map the relationship between the design requirements and the design attributes (0, 1, 3, 9) in the centre of the house
  • indicate the relationships between design attributes at the top of the house
  • indicate the TPMs, direction of improvement and targets at the base of the house
  • benchmark competitor products on the right of the house
  • revise the mappings continuously as the project develops and the requirements change

Hints

At the core of the mapping is a relationship between two aspects of the problem. Some ideas are:

  • customer requirements v design requirements/attributes
  • design requirements v design attributes / subsystems / work teams
  • staff/team members v capabilities/professional attributes
  • pizzas/cakes v toppings/ingredients

Find what are the most useful aspects to map for your problem.

Core resources

  • Hauser, J.R. and D. Clausing, The House of Quality in Harvard Business Review, May 1988. The House of Quality) free reprint [PDF, 13 pages]

Useful resources

  • QFD - HoQ Tutorial by Dr A Lowe [Flash file]
  • Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and House of Quality - MIT - goes through the process step-by-step, by Dr. Michael Short [video, 44m]

Updated:  12 Mar 2018/ Responsible Officer:  Head of School/ Page Contact:  Page Contact