(2011-04-11) Andreasson Lean Product Development Flow Don Reinertsen

Ingemar Andreassonon Lean Product Development Flow - Don Reinertsen

In the book Principles Of Product Development Flow, the terms “first generation” and “second generation” are used to highlight an evolving understanding of how lean methods can be applied in product development.

First generation approaches started with the ideas of lean manufacturing and peaked at Toyota’s application of these ideas in its product development system. However, ideas that work with the repetitive, low-variability work of manufacturing are often not suited to fast moving markets that rely on innovation

Second generation approaches use Toyota as a starting point and incorporate advanced methods from many other domains. These include ideas from economics, queueing theory, statistics, telecommunication network design, computer operating systems, control engineering, and maneuver warfare. More advanced ideas are needed because the domain of product development is intrinsically less repetitive and more variable than manufacturing. As a result, you have to look to domains that have learned to achieve flow in the presence of variability – not domains that achieve flow by eliminating variability.

Second generation thinking is more science-based. It emphasizes the need to understand the mechanism of action behind methods. It emphasizes the quantification that is required to make tradeoffs between multiple important objectives.

When a process with variability is loaded to high levels of utilization our work products will spend most of their cycle time waiting in queue.

The higher we load our resources the slower our cycle time becomes. “Where do we load our processes today? Typically above 98 percent utilization! It should be no surprise that we have queues,”

These queues increase cycle time and overhead. They hurt quality by delaying feedback. They demotivate our workers. How do we reduce them? It starts by measuring them and quantifying their cost.

All product development activities attempt to simultaneously satisfy multiple competing performance objectives

If you ask people working on the same project to independently estimate the cost of delay on their project and you will get answers that differ by 50 to 1.

gaining the support of management. Management has the legal duty to pay attention to the economic consequences of its choices. Management always has surplus of good ideas to spend money on. When we package our choices within an economic framework we enable management to choose between these ideas quickly and correctly