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Quality Function Deployment (QFD) has been practiced by leading companies around the world since 1966. Its two‐fold purpose is to assure that true customer needs are properly deployed throughout the design, build and delivery of a new product, whether it be assembled, processed, serviced, or even software, and to improve the product development process itself. This paper describes the evolution of the method, its current best practice, and proposals for future direction, not only to log its history and key players correctly, but also to convey the richness and depth of the applications throughout multiple industries.

This study aims to describe how the Hoshin Kanri (HK) strategic methodology facilitates implementation of lean management (LM), achieving greater integration of the strategic and operational levels, resulting in higher performance level.

The authors conducted an in-depth case study of a top-10 Spanish food retail company with experience in HK and LM. First, the authors conducted 17 semi-structured interviews with the management team. Second, the authors analyzed all minutes from meetings of the key management entities for HK monitoring over a period of 3 years (2016–2019). Third, the authors evaluated the reports and key scorecards for the same period. Finally, authors visited the operating facilities and attended multiple team management meetings.

This study demonstrates that deploying HK creates the strategic ecosystem for operations management that facilitates successful implementation of LM. By sharing common cultural concepts, both methodologies generate faster transformation of the organization and thus push it towards its strategic objectives with more determination and better performance.

The lack of strategic alignment is one of the most important reasons for LM failure. Although HK is a strategic methodology that facilitates this alignment, a gap exists in the literature on the benefits of HK for implementation of continuous improvement initiatives such as LM. Our research shows how HK enables a participative connection between the strategic and operational areas of the firm that reinforces the fundamental elements of LM. Employee involvement, widespread use of plan-do-check-act (PDCA) methodology and multidisciplinary work (among other effects) make HK a key element for successful implementation of LM.

Frame resonance and innovative tactics can substitute for a movement’s lack of important resources to sustain protests. This chapter shows how the insurgent groups in the 2011 Tunisian uprising that lacked mass-based organizations and national leaders maintained and spread the protests using frame resonance and innovative tactics. It argues that the activists’ strategy of frame resonance drew on the collective identity of the poor people in the interior regions, mainly their collective feeling of social marginalization. Activist organizers also relied on a motivational campaign aimed at converting the feelings of injustice held by those in the interior regions into anger against the regime. The innovative tactics of the activists included locating protests inside poor people’s neighborhoods, especially in coastal regions. The engagement of poor people in the protests sustained them in two ways: by spreading and intensifying protests through individual initiatives, and by weakening the Tunisian police in sustained disruptive actions and spontaneous riots. These findings are based on the narratives of 81 activists, insurgent groups’ documents, chanted slogans, and official state documents. The fieldwork research was conducted in Tunisia during the months of April and May 2012, and June 2013.

The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.

Status, which is based on differences in esteem and honor, is an ancient and universal form of inequality which nevertheless interpenetrates modern institutions and organizations. Given its ubiquity and significance, we need to better understand the basic nature of status as a form of inequality. I argue that status hierarches are a cultural invention to organize and manage social relations in a fundamental human condition: cooperative interdependence to achieve valued goals with nested competitive interdependence to maximize individual outcomes in the effort. I consider this claim in relation to both evolutionary arguments and empirical evidence. Evidence suggests that the cultural schema of status is two-fold, consisting of a deeply learned basic norm of status allocation and a set of more explicit, variable, and changing common knowledge status beliefs that people draw on to coordinate judgments about who or what is more deserving of higher status. The cultural nature of status allows people to spread it widely to social phenomena (e.g., firms in a business field) well beyond its origins in interpersonal hierarchies. In particular, I argue, the association of status with social difference groups (e.g., race, gender, class-as-culture) gives inequalities based on those difference groups an autonomous, independent capacity to reproduce themselves through interpersonal status processes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of the study is to provide a concrete, integrated plan to improve the service quality of mobile government (m-government) services from the customer perspective in the Gulf Cooperation Council.

A quantitative approach was used to analyze a case study of the UAE Ministry of Interior (MOI) mobile application and a competitor: the MOI application of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Data were collected using a focus group.

Results show that the technical requirement “real time” has the highest priority for deployment and “tangible service” has the lowest priority.

Findings are limited to m-government services. Further studies could explore other government services such as traditional face-to-face services.

Results imply that if government decision-makers or software developers aim to understand customer requirements and improve their mobile services accordingly, the quality-function-deployment (QFD) approach is much more effective than traditional approaches in which decisions regarding services are prioritized based on the decision-makers or software developers’ perspectives.

Many previous studies have applied QFD for developing products based on customer needs. This, however, is one of the few studies to successfully apply the QFD matrix to m-government services.