Estudante: Sanaz Azarnoosh

Título: “A Value-Based Socio-Technical Framework to Support Product Improvement through the House of Quality”

Data: 19/12/2025

Hora: 14:00

Localização: Anfiteatro PA-3, Edifício de Matemática (Piso -1)

Orientador: Professor João Carlos da Cruz Lourenço (IST)

Coorientador: Professor Isabel Maria da Silva João (ISEL)

Breve descrição do trabalho: Product designers may believe their products are in line with customers’ expectations, but this is often not the case. The most important information for technical teams during product design is understanding how each technical characteristic (TC) contributes to satisfying customers’ needs, which is the core purpose of the House of Quality (HoQ). The HoQ is a collaborative framework whose effectiveness relies on both technical and social components. Technically, the weights of TCs are essential for informed product design decisions, but traditional HoQ weighting approaches have faced issues such as inappropriate measurement scales and inadequate analytical methods for weighting customer requirements (CRs) and constructing the relationship matrix linking TCs to CRs. Designers also encounter resource constraints that prevent simultaneous enhancements of all TCs, making the objective identifying an efficient portfolio of TC improvements that delivers the highest value for a resource limit. On the social side, engaging stakeholders poses challenges, and a key limitation of traditional HoQ is its static approach to identifying CRs in early design stages. This thesis proposes a socio-technical framework to address these shortcomings. From a technical standpoint, the framework includes weighting CRs based on specific performance improvements, developing value functions for CRs and TCs to translate performance into value, and constructing a relationship matrix that reflects the added value of TCs’ improvements on CRs, resulting in meaningful TC weights. A portfolio decision analysis approach identifies efficient TC improvements that respect resource constraints and account for interdependencies among TCs. On the social side, Agile methodologies are integrated into the HoQ to help translate the voice of the customer into the voice of the designer. We validate the proposed research through a case study involving a digital transformation platform.

Unidade de Investigação: Centro de Estudos de Gestão do Instituto Superior Técnico (CEGIST)