Defining network capabilities using the voice of the customer

AT&T´s Switching Systems Business Unit (SSBU) is establishing requirements for future network fabric capabilities. To help ensure that these capabilities are driven by the needs of various telecommunications customer segments, SSBU chose to use elements of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to collect and organize customers needs. QFD is a leading-edge team-based approach for gathering the voice of the customer and converting it into deployable product and service attributes. After collecting the needs set, the SSBU team validated the needs (including perceived importance ratings) with customers as a check on the integrity of the set. The validated needs will be used to guide establishment of technical requirements as products are developed. This paper describes how SSBU applied elements of the QFD toolset to generate the customer-validated set of network fabric needs. The QFD approach was used on a project that had already started, allowing a comparison of existing methodology to the QFD methodology