Understanding mission objectives and priorities with QFD

Translating the customer's perception of quality and performance into technical terms and requirements for a product is important for guiding design, verification, and process development. Capturing the unspoken priorities and communicating them through the organization can efficiently guide the product or service development towards solutions that meet the customers’ needs. The methods used at Kongsberg Defence Systems today do not sufficiently capture and communicate the voice of the customer and their fundamental needs. The research uncovered that key decision makers in the organization had significant variance in their understanding of customer priorities, and a partial misalignment with the priorities provided by customer representatives. The implementation of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) for the Joint Strike Missile provided an effective communication tool for customer needs, and illuminated the relative importance of system attributes and how they relate to the customer's priorities. This paper argues that the Quality Function Deployment is a valuable tool communicating mission objectives, to enable innovation, and to guide verification and validation efforts at a later stage. For complex products, however, QFD shows weaknesses that must be addressed to support efficient decision making. Introduction The Joint Strike Missile (JSM) has been in development at Kongsberg Defence Systems (KDS) since 2004 and is one of the most advanced military development programs ever conducted in Norway. Its objective is to equip future Royal Norwegian Air Force (RoNAF) F-35 combat aircraft with a weapon that allows for high precision engagement of highly defended sea-, littoral-, and land targets at very long range. In many ways the missile operates as a small autonomous aircraft that has been designed to strike vessels equipped with advanced self-defence systems at a distance, as well as land-based targets. The JSM is made from advanced composites, and is designed to have a minimal radar signature. Along with its ability to fly along the ground and hide in the terrain, this ensures that the missile will go undetected until very close to the target. The final development is expected to be concluded by the end of 2017, and the integration of the missile on the F -35 is expected to be completed as part of a specific iteration of upgrades on the F-35, known as "Block 4", during 2022-2024. As an AS9100 certified organization, KDS is committed to continuously improving, with emphasis on meeting customer needs and regulatory requirements. With support from KDS, this research investigates the application of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to improve KDS's requirements engineering capacity and ensuring that customer needs and priorities are thoroughly reflected in the development of its products. The following research was conducted on the JSM system as a proof of concept of the potential contributions from QFD, leaving out the support equipment and focusing on the core product. Even though the development has been going on for quite some time, there are still JSM specific benefits to expect from the QFD analysis; for instance, a better understanding of which characteristics should be given the most attention during system and subsystem verification and validation. The following section will set the scene for the research process and present the main questions investigated in this paper. This is followed by an explanation of the work conducted to gather the required data, the observations that have been made, and finally an overall discussion of the findings. Background The main external stakeholders for the JSM are the RoNAF and aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin (LMCO). The customer, RoNAF, through their long-term strategic planning, has identified a need for a weapon for high precision engagement of highly defended sea-, littoral-, and land targets at very long range, with an advanced set of capabilities to counter tomorrow's threats. The needs identification for what would become JSM began while the government was evaluating new fighter aircraft to replace the aging F-16. Feasibility studies were conducted involving KDS, the Norwegian and Australian Air Force, and US and UK defense consultants and experts. A specification was formed, an image, of what the next generation missile's operational capabilities should be, formally known as the Operational Requirement Document (ORD). This continued to evolve when RoNAF contracted LMCO to build a model of the missile concept into their simulator, Partner Manned Training System, for concept validation purposes. Soon thereafter KDS was under contract to develop the JSM based on the ORD. The JSM capabilities and characteristics were developed form the experience of the Royal Norwegian Navy's sibling, the Naval Strike Missile (NSM). However, while many of its features and characteristics are similar, only a fraction of NSM could be brought forward into JSM, resulting in significant development effort and reconsideration of every aspect. Neither documentation from the development of the ORD, the ORD itself, nor the contract, indicates any prioritization among needs, requirements or the project management triangle of cost, schedule and quality. The Air System project manager stated in an interview (Sørsdal, 2015) that the prioritization among characteristics was done through the work culminating in the ORD, meaning that primarily RoNAF, already was very specific about the solution at the time. An additional internal top level requirements document was created as well, named the KDS Requirements document. This acted as a placeholder for the stretch goals that were identified during the feasibility study, but not specified by RoNAF in the ORD. These are formulated as shall-requirements and included in the official requirement documents list, but because KDS has not financially committed itself and established a formal ownership to these requirements, they are in practice just should goals. However, this document does not indicate any prioritization either. The JSM program is organized in two separate, but closely related projects; Air System, and JSM Development. These two projects have independent project management and resources, but are both under the same program manager. In the System of Systems (SoS) that incorporates the JSM program, the JSM Development project is set to focus on the missile itself, the storage container, and maintenance equipment. The Air System project works with the customer and LMCO as the primary and formal interface, writing detailed JSM and SoS concepts, detailed missile specifications for the JSM development project, and developing the mutual interface specification with LMCO. In addition they develop planning software to be integrated in the aircraft's ground based tactical and strategic planning system. The organizational relationships and specification flow is illustrated in Figure 1. Two additional channels have also been formed in later years. The Air System project has established the Operational Forum, a series of meetings for early validation of system concepts, and JSM Development project has had similar Technical Focus Group meetings with the customer to establish what is "good enough" on those very important, but hard-to-quantify performance characteristics of specific subsystems. Figure 1. Organizational entities and requirement flow Because of the magnitude of new development and reconsiderations that have been made without an established set of priorities, the development teams have had difficulties with prioritizing effectively, and decisions seem to take longer than necessary. These experiences show that it would be beneficial to obtain a deeper understanding of the needs and priorities behind the system requirements than those found in the ORD and KDS Requirements document. Quality Function Deployment is a potential Systems Engineering method for establishing these priorities, and is included in the INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook (Haskins, 2011) as a recommended tool for supporting the requirement analysis process. When established in the beginning of the project lifecycle, it can benefit throughout the Systems Engineering development lifecycle to also support trade studies. Also for the current state of the JSM project, it would be beneficial to know the importance of the different needs and system characteristics for the purpose of focusing efforts during qualification and verification, as well as prioritizing early validation activities with the customer. The authors’ assertion is that the Quality Function Deployment method can assist in communicating the goals and priorities of the system and subsystems between the customer and engineering disciplines. It can increase the decisiveness and confidence in priorities, especially when facing trade-off decisions, increase the effectiveness of the organization and product value. To investigate this claim the author has created a proof of concept by applying QFD on the JSM project. The following questions are posed to uncover if the information conveyed by the QFD products were relevant to the development team and management: 1. Is the Quality Function Deployment process a good tool for understanding the customer perceived qualities and priorities? 2. How well does the Quality Function Deployment communicate the importance of technical characteristics to the development team? 3. How can the products of the Quality Function Deployment process be useful when a trade-off decision must be made? Research method The process used for implementing QFD is largely based on the book by Ficalora, J.P. and Cohen, L. (2009); Quality function deployment and Six Sigma: a QFD handbook. This book has a complete list of steps needed to be performed in a QFD analysis and tips on how to perform them, including building the House of Quality. This research into the application of QFD as a method in KDS