(2007-08-01) Agile Manufacturing

Interesting article about conference sessions discussing how Agile Software Development and manufacturing can learn from each other. Lean Manufacturing vs Lean Development is an obvious area of cross-over. In an email correspondence with us, PaulHodgetts pointed out that agile practices currently fall short when it comes to engaging business management, marketing, and Product Management, and they also fall short when it comes to actual deployment. Those are the areas that Hodgetts feels lean manufacturing principles could not only offer some answers, but offer answers that could enable agile methods to spread their footprint from project to enterprise level

Jeff Sutherland, who co-created the Scrum project methodology (an extension of agile) while at Easel Corp. in the early 1990s, delivered a presentation on how agile principles could be extended to Product Development.

At Headwaters Inc., a manufacturer of high tech products for oil and gas production that grew through M&A from a $20 million firm in 2000 to a $1 billion company today, those principles were applied in practice to development of innovative products such as carbon nanospheres... Then, as a product is developed, it uses the same kinds of cross functional teams that are the hallmark of agile, as well as the same kinds of short project iterations or stages. And it uses the same kinds of daily planning sessions, and the same adaptive planning from one project stage (or iteration) to the next.