Swapping Order
April 23, 2008 – 8:19 pmYesterday I spent quite a bit of time moving the requirements around in my QFD spreadsheet. I use a template much like the House of Quality (QFD) Template that is produced by QFD Online. I would use the one produced by QFD Online, only my template has a couple of essential items that I need for my job that QFD Online’s doesn’t have. Among these items are a Rank column that takes dependency into account and a column for referencing an ID used by a separate tracking system. My template also includes some handy macros and other things.
What my template doesn’t include, however, is the ability to move requirements around easily. This is also true of QFD Online’s templates. If you want to change order, then you have to go through a painful copy-paste-clear process that takes hours to complete on a populated QFD. Like I said, I spent hours doing it.
I would have like to have been able to use QFD Online’s web-based “QFD Builder” software, but like their templates, it doesn’t take dependencies into account. What it does do, however, is facilitate sorting and re-ordering of requirements very easily. I hope that they will continue to augment this application because it is affordable (read “free” currently), and it is much easier to modify than my current templates. Unfortunately, it still lacks a little in functionality.