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Journal of Education for Business

ISSN: 0883-2323 (Print) 1940-3356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vjeb20

Curriculum and Course Design: A New Approach
Using Quality Function Deployment
James W. Denton , Virginia Franke & Kleist Nanda Surendra
To cite this article: James W. Denton , Virginia Franke & Kleist Nanda Surendra (2005)
Curriculum and Course Design: A New Approach Using Quality Function Deployment, Journal
of Education for Business, 81:2, 111-117, DOI: 10.3200/JOEB.81.2.111-118
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/JOEB.81.2.111-118

Published online: 07 Aug 2010.

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Curriculum and Course Design:
A New Approach Using Quality
Function Deployment
JAMES W. DENTON
VIRGINIA FRANKE KLEIST
NANDA SURENDRA
WEST VIRGINIA UNIVERSITY
MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA

ABSTRACT. In this article, the authors

describe a method for assuring the quality
of curriculum design based on techniques
that have been used in industrial settings for
over 30 years. Quality Function Deployment assures that the needs of the customer
are considered at all levels of product
design and a graphical matrix called the
House of Quality serves as an aid in achieving its objectives. We provide an example
showing how to apply these principles and
techniques to business curriculum and
course design in the academic domain of
Management Information Systems. The
resulting curricula will be more likely to
address the needs of the employers of business school graduates and the resulting documentation will be valuable in guiding subsequent curriculum redesigns as the needs
of business evolve.
Copyright © 2005 Heldref Publications

I

t is a nearly universal problem in
academia that resources are limited,

and this constraint is nowhere more
apparent than in curriculum and course
design. Often, there are too few faculty
members to achieve depth in all areas of
a major field or not enough courses available in a sequence to enable the students
to achieve full exposure to all of the
important topics in an educational program. Further, at times there may be a
lack of coordination across or within
courses to ensure that either the duplication or overlap of topics is eliminated.
The challenges of maintaining an upto-date curriculum are even greater in
an area such as Management Information Systems (MIS), which is constantly changing as technology advances.
MIS education is a dynamic discipline,
and, therefore, is in constant need for
reassessment (Gill & Hu, 1999; Lee,
Trauth, & Farwell, 1995). Failure to
reassess MIS education risks the inability to keep up with the needs of the corporate employers of the students in
those academic MIS programs. Sound
curriculum design must balance the
needs of all of the program’s stakeholders (Lightfoot, 1999) and incorporate
the viewpoints of MIS practitioners

(Ehie, 2002). As a consequence of
these factors, the construction of educational programs and courses within
the MIS curriculum would benefit from
using a formal design methodology to

assure the efficient deployment of
scarce inputs to the educational production process.
In this article, we propose that the
technique of Quality Function Deployment (QFD), aided by a graphical aid,
the House of Quality (HoQ), may be
useful in curriculum and course design.
QFD and the HoQ are taken from the
reference discipline of Quality Assurance and are normally applied in an
industrial setting. Here, we describe the
QFD process and its applicability in
course programming and then apply the
process in a sample curriculum application, as well as within a sample course.
We suggest that the use of these quality
assurance techniques can yield benefits
to educational leadership in overcoming

resource constraints while delivering
rich and deep courses within a welldesigned curriculum.
QFD is used in industry to assure that
the design and manufacture of new products considers all of the needs and desires
of the customer (Cohen, 1995; Day,
1993). It originated in Japan’s shipbuilding industry in the early 1970s (Kogure
& Akao, 1983) and was introduced to
Western managers by Hauser and Clausing (1988). In addition to manufacturing,
the QFD approach has been applied to
such varied activities as strategic planning (Maddux, Amos, & Wyskida, 1991),
project management (Hill & Warfield,
1972), and group decision support sysNovember/December 2005

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tems (Wolfe, 1994). QFD is a tool to aid
communications between an organization’s marketing function, which is aware
of the needs and desires of the customer,

and the engineering function, which must
produce a technical product specification
that satisfies those needs and desires. In
industry, it is common to develop complex products by designing multiple
components of those products concurrently instead of sequentially, saving time
in bringing a new product to market. The
parallel nature of the design makes communication critical, so that all of the
designed components fit together resulting in a product that is neither deficient in
satisfying customer requirements, nor
overengineered with unnecessarily duplicated features.
The industrial process of designing a
product to satisfy certain customer
requirements is similar to the academic
process of designing a curriculum to
satisfy the needs of its constituents. For
example, in the university setting, we
have administrators who set curricular
objectives, professors who design academic programs and individual courses
according to their own views, and students who become the products of the
educational programmatic design.

Courses within a new academic program are often developed concurrently
and then assembled, possibly with existing courses, into a curriculum. It is critical that such courses cover all of the
necessary topics so that students in the
academic program do not miss critical
information while avoiding unnecessary
duplication.
Practitioners in industry often use a
simple graphical tool, the House of Quality, as an aid in achieving the objectives
of the QFD approach to design. The HoQ
technique presents a conceptual map to
assist in identifying key relationships in
the design, provide documentation for
the design process, and assure that the
needs of the customer are not forgotten.
In industry, applying the HoQ offers a
convenient method for translating customer requirements into product specifications. It can provide a similar function
in an academic environment by providing
a map for translating the expected capabilities of graduating students into course
and curriculum content. The following
sections describe the formal HoQ process

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in an industrial setting followed by an
example from an academic setting.
Structure of the HoQ
In their article, Hauser and Clausing
(1988) used the design of a car door to
provide an example of how the HoQ
approach is applied in an industrial setting. Figure 1 shows part of the resulting
HoQ matrix for the car door example
and illustrates how the HoQ approach is
used to assure that all of the quality
requirements of the customer are
addressed in the product’s design. The
HoQ includes six major areas that fit
together to form the shape of a house.
Customer requirements are listed in
Area 1. For example, in designing typical customer requirements for a car door

in terms that the customer understands
might include: “easy to close,” “easy to
open,” and “stays open on a hill.” These
customer requirements are typically
gathered through market research and
focus groups and serve as functional
specifications for the component.
Area 2 of the HoQ lists engineering
characteristics in technical terms. In the
car door example, this area would
include specification of the effort
required to open and close the door,
expressed as measures of force and
energy that engineers understand, but
would be meaningless to a typical customer. A „ next to a characteristic indicates that more of that characteristic is
desirable and a † indicates that less of
the characteristic is desirable.
The relationship matrix in Area 3
shows correlations between the customer requirements and the engineering
characteristics. Double plus and minus

signs indicate strong positive and strong
negative correlations, respectively, and
single plus and minus signs indicate
weaker correlations. The relationship
matrix is useful in industry for coordinating potential design changes in
response to a customer requirement, so
that other customer requirements are not
compromised. For example, engineers
involved in the design of a car door may
increase the door seal resistance in an
effort to reduce the likelihood of a leak
in rainy weather. That change, however,
will negatively impact the ability to easily close the door. Engineers, therefore,
must evaluate this trade-off as they con-

sider potential design changes. The purpose of the HoQ is not to decide this
design issue, but rather to make sure
that the issue is raised in the design
phase, before costly production changes
or product recalls become necessary.

Area 4 of the industrial HoQ is typically used to identify trade-offs between
pairs of engineering characteristics. For
example, increasing the door’s peak closing force will improve the door seal resistance, but this may cause a decrease in
customer satisfaction because the door
will not be as easy to close from the outside, as indicated in the relationship
matrix. This provides a warning to engineers that such changes should be made
with care. Synergies may also be identified in this area. For example, acoustic
transmission will positively affect road
noise reduction. The trade-off matrix in
Area 4 allows the entire design team,
both engineers and marketers, to recognize the downstream ramifications of
making changes to a product’s design.
Area 5 of the HoQ is used for competitive assessment, where two or three
competing products typically are selected
for comparison with the proposed product design. A comparison between the
proposed product and each competing
product is made for every customer
requirement in Area 1. This step reveals
the strengths and the weaknesses of the
new design and, through the relationship
matrix, points to engineering characteristics that may require adjustment to better
compete in the marketplace.
Area 6, the basement of the HoQ, is
used for technical assessment and setting
target values for the engineering characteristics. The technical assessment of our
car door versus our competitors’ products
lists the actual measurement of the engineering characteristics for each product
and specifies target values for our
redesign effort.
Using Quality Function
Deployment in Curriculum
Design
The following describes how the
HoQ approach can be applied to the
design of an academic program. As an
example, a hypothetical MIS curriculum will be used. Figure 2 shows a sampling of the entries that might be placed
in each of the six areas of the HoQ.

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Area 1 lists the expected abilities of
the program’s graduates. These represent desirable outcomes for the customer that result from using the product.
In this context, the product is a graduate
of the MIS program, and the customer is
their future employer, the downstream
consumer of the academic product. The
IS 2002 model curriculum guidelines
for an undergraduate degree in information systems (Gorgone et. al., 2002) was
used to identify the desired capabilities

of MIS graduates. Because of space
limitations, our figure shows only a subset of the 72 capabilities in 14 areas listed in the curriculum guidelines.
Of course, the specific expected abilities of the graduates will vary depending on the academic discipline. In areas
such as creative arts or a liberal arts
program, the output abilities may be
conceptual, hard to establish, and complex to measure. In an engineering curriculum, the output abilities will be

more traditional, clear-cut, and have less
variance across universities. In the MIS
discipline, expected graduate abilities
fall into several categories: (a) communication, (b) information technology, (c)
professional behavior, (d) interpersonal
relationships, (e) management, (f) problem solving, (g) systems analysis and
development, (h) systems theory, and (i)
computer applications. Within each of
these general areas are more specific
abilities and skills. For example, the
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communication area would include the
ability to write memos, reports, and
documentation; the ability to organize
and make a presentation; the ability to
express complex ideas in simple terms;
and the ability to obtain information
through surveys and interviews. System
analysis skills include the ability to
select and use appropriate methods; the
ability to use analysis and design tools;
the ability to assess feasibility and risk;
and the ability to apply design methods.
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Journal of Education for Business

These graduate abilities are analogous
to the customer requirements in the
industrial HoQ. This listing assures that
customer needs, or the needs of potential employers, will be considered in the
curriculum design.
Area 2 contains elements of the common body-of-knowledge of the specific
academic discipline represented. For an
MIS curriculum, the body-of-knowledge
consists of: (a) computer architecture, (b)
data structures, (c) programming lan-

guages, (d) databases, (e) decision theory,
(f) organizational behavior, (g) systems
development, and (h) project management. For a creative arts graduate, the
common body-of-knowledge might contain (a) design essentials, (b) performance criteria, and (c) portfolio outputs.
Body-of-knowledge elements, therefore,
are analogous to the engineering characteristics shown in Area 2 of the industrial
HoQ. Whereas engineering characteristics are expressed in the language of the

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engineer, body-of-knowledge elements
are expressed in the language of the academic practitioner. One difference is that
engineering characteristics are measurable (road noise levels, forces required to
open and close doors, etc.), but body-ofknowledge elements are not so easily
quantified.
Area 3 of the HoQ, the relationship
matrix, links the vocationally motivated
expected capabilities of graduates in
Area 1 to the common body-of-knowledge components of an academic specialization in Area 2. The relationship
matrix performs the critical function of
exploring the intersection between the
specific outputs required by potential
employers and the overarching themes
that the students are expected to command. Any gaps, weaknesses, or redundancies in coverage will be shown on
the relationship matrix. Program
designers must assure that each expected graduate ability is addressed adequately in the body-of-knowledge covered by the program.
For example, if an expected graduate
ability is not related to any body-ofknowledge element, additional body-ofknowledge elements should be added to
the curriculum. It also may be possible
to identify extraneous body-of-knowledge elements so that they may be
removed from the curriculum. In addition, the HoQ functions as a road map
for potential future changes in the curriculum. When changes in a program’s
body-of-knowledge are considered, the
HoQ will show the impact of those
changes on the abilities of the program’s
graduates. Alternatively, as the requirements of graduates change, the HoQ
will indicate how the body-of-knowledge elements should be adjusted. Thus,
the relationship matrix can function as a
formal mechanism to evaluate the tradeoff between expectations of the faculty
and the expectations of the employer
with respect to a student’s ownership of
knowledge.
In the academic version of the HoQ,
Area 4 does not provide identifiable
paired trade-offs as are apparent in the
industrial HoQ. Increasing a component
in one area of the body-of-knowledge
will not adversely affect another specific area, but there is a general trade-off
among all areas: An increase in empha-

sis on one area will necessarily decrease
the emphasis on other areas because
there is a finite amount of time available
in the curriculum. Instead of identifying
trade-offs, we suggest that Area 4
should be used to identify and capture
critical prerequisite areas to ensure
proper learning flow and understanding
on the part of the students. In this way,
the HoQ can indicate that the study of
systems analysis should precede the
study of systems design.
In a similar vein, the competitive
assessment in Area 5 of the industrial
HoQ cannot be transferred directly into
its academic counterpart. It is not practical or even appropriate to identify specific “competitors” as a curriculum is
being designed, but a relative assessment can nonetheless be accomplished
eventually through feedback received
from program graduates and their
employers. The assessment may reveal
weaknesses that can be addressed
through adjusting the curriculum design
in response to specific deficiencies in
the abilities of the graduates.
In the industrial HoQ, Area 6 provides
a technical assessment of the engineering
characteristics of Area 2 compared with
those of existing competitors. It also indicates target values for design improvement efforts. The same area can be used
in the academic HoQ to show the relative
amount of time spent in each of the bodyof-knowledge areas identified in Area 2
and to indicate potential increases or
decreases in emphasis for certain bodyof-knowledge areas. These numbers can
be entered as classroom hours, or percentages of the total curriculum. Thus,
curriculum designers will be constrained
not to exceed the total number of classroom hours available. When the classroom hours covering one body-of-knowledge area are increased, it also will be
necessary to identify an equivalent number of hours representing a decrease in
other areas.
Extending the HoQ
In industry, it is common to continue
the design process by increasing the
level of detail and constructing an additional HoQ for each of the subcomponent parts that make up a component.
When moving to a higher level of detail,

the engineering characteristics in Area 2
are listed in Area 1 of the new HoQ,
becoming requirements to be addressed
in the design of each subcomponent. The
academic HoQ can be similarly broken
down into more detailed matrices that
address the design of the individual
courses that make up the curriculum.
Figure 3 shows how the HoQ for an
MIS curriculum design might be
extended to the course level. The HoQ
for one course, Systems Analysis, is
shown. Area 1 lists a subset of the bodyof-knowledge elements identified for
the curriculum that are appropriate for
the systems analysis course, taken from
Area 2 of the curriculum-level HoQ. A
course designer can add activities in
Area 2 that are necessary to achieve the
objectives of the body-of-knowledge
elements (e.g., guest speakers, projects,
videos, textbook exercises, case studies,
and readings). The relationship matrix
in Area 3 indicates which classroom
activities will address each of the
required body-of-knowledge elements.
Area 4 can be used to indicate sequence
requirements of the activities, Area 5
can be used to assess the degree to
which the objectives of the body-ofknowledge elements were attained, and
Area 6 can be used to target improvements and redesign opportunities for
future course offerings.
In the curriculum-level HoQ, Area 1
contains the whats of the curriculum
design, (i.e., what the customer wants).
Area 2 contains the hows (i.e., how the
curriculum design will deliver what the
customer wants). At the next HoQ level,
the hows of the curriculum design
become the whats of the course design.
Thus, each element identified as critical
for achieving customer satisfaction
must be addressed in the design of the
courses that make up the curriculum.
Conclusions
We have shown how an established
tool from the field of quality assurance
can be applied to the academic activities
of curriculum and course design. The
technique of quality function deployment and the associated HoQ graphic
can be used to assure that a program’s
graduates have skills and abilities that
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ers. After the initial development of the
curriculum, the HoQ can be used as a
guide for revising and updating the curriculum. QFD can be a valuable tool in
developing curricula in an environment
of limited resources.
An MIS curriculum is a particularly
good candidate for applying QFD and
HoQ principles. MIS is a rapidly changing field, and it is a challenge for academics to keep up with the constant evolution of information technologies and
their uses. Business practitioners and
academic researchers agree that the
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Journal of Education for Business

skills and abilities of MIS graduates
must undergo constant revision to guarantee that those graduates will be capable of providing valuable service to
their employers. The documentation
provided by the HoQ will be invaluable
in guiding those revisions. Thus, the
“voice of the customer,” in the form of
the employers of MIS graduates, will be
heard in the design of the courses to be
taken by its graduates.
The HoQ serves as a formal road map
to translate graduate requirements in the
language of employers into curriculum

elements in the language of the academics. Ideally, this process will result in a
give-and-take exchange of views on how
to best design a curriculum that serves
the needs of future employers. The QFD
process forces curriculum designers to
adopt a “customer orientation” and formally address the needs of the job market in determining the body-of-knowledge elements that make up the
curriculum. Further, those body-ofknowledge elements will become course
requirements that must be addressed
when individual courses are designed.

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Adherence to the QFD procedure will
reduce the likelihood of knowledge gaps
in graduating students while at the same
time minimize unnecessary duplication
in topic coverage.
NOTE
Correspondence concerning this article should
be addressed to Dr. James W. Denton, Associate
Professor, College of Business and Economics,
West Virginia University, PO Box 6025, Morgantown, West Virginia 26506-6025. E-mail: jim.denton@mail.wvu.edu
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