Case study of quality function deployment method in defence missions

In 2015, the First Principles Review (FPR) of Australian Defence recommended an increase in the validity and transparency of estimates of the whole of life cost and capability throughout the Defence acquisition process. FPR also recommended that the value proposition for new capability acquisitions be made explicit rather than being left implicit, and greater contestability was recommended, especially at the earliest stages where concepts and systems architectures are compared. Military cost-benefit assessment (CBA) can be used to provide these defensible views, but requires a high degree of systems analysis expertise and access to robust and reliable cost and capability data. This project investigates applicable methods and practices for conceptual systems analysis in the new Defence Capability Life Cycle design process [1]. This paper explores a method to capture the capture customer requirements and convert them to engineering characteristics known as Quality Function Deployment (QFD). A nominal example of a Defence mission was used to generate required data through expert elicitation. Issues of data quality and organizational difficulty were considered.