Quality infrastructure improvement: using QFD to manage project priorities and project management resources

Purpose – A common difficulty for an information technology (IT) department is to focus resources (people) where they can deliver the greatest benefit for the efforts made. It sometimes happens that a bias develops where some departments insist that their projects are more critical than others and they demand not only that their projects be attended to immediately, but also that the most senior people be assigned to them. To better utilize resources, it makes sense to prioritize projects on their benefit contribution to internal and external customers, as well as to assign skill‐appropriate people to work on them. National City has applied QFD to help them in identifying and prioritizing the needs of their customers and then using these to evaluate each project for its benefit contribution and for its degree of complexity, which will help assign appropriate resources to the project. Design/methodology/approach – This paper will show how we customized the QFD process through the QFD Green Belt ® training of the QFD Institute. It is shown how the list of internal customer needs, which became the criteria for determining project benefit, and then developed another set of criteria to judge the project complexity and the required technical skill level to work on the project, were developed. The paper includes charts and matrices defining the process. Findings – National City can now prioritize its internal IT projects and assign the most appropriate people to them in order to deliver the greatest value to National City's customers. Originality/value – QFD helped National City to manage internal initiatives by prioritizing them according to the benefits they had. Project management and technical resources can now schedule their time according to priority, which reduces non‐effective multitasking and will allow for more initiatives to be completed in the long run.