A set of planning and communication routines, quality function deployment focuses and coordinates skills within an organization, first to design, then to manufacture and market goods that customers want to purchase.
The house of quality is a kind of conceptual map that provides the means for inter-functional planning and communications. People with different problems and responsibilities can thrash out design priorities while referring to patterns of evidence on the house’s grid.The basic structure is a table with "Whats" as the labels on the left and "Hows" across the top. The roof is a diagonal matrix of "Hows vs. Hows" and the body of the house is a matrix of "Whats vs. Hows". Both of these matrices are filled with indicators of whether the interaction of the specific item is a strong positive, a strong negative, or somewhere in between. Additional annexes on the right side and bottom hold the "Whys" (market research, etc.) and the "How Muches". Rankings based on the Whys and the correlations can be used to calculate priorities for the Hows.
House of Quality analysis can also be cascaded, with "Hows" from one level becoming the "Whats" of a lower level; as this progresses the decisions get closer to the engineering/manufacturing details.