(2014-02-21) Alopex Engineering Productivity

Alopex on Engineering Productivity

Theory of Constraints

Eli Goldratt’s book The Goal (1984)

achieve results in manufacturing are stable demand, moderate to high volume, repeatable processes, and a small range of products.

Unstable Production Environments

Goldratt observed that product development systems do not exhibit processes that are ‘network of dependent events with processes that are subject to statistical fluctuations’. Each new product develop effort tend to have a unique network of dependent events with high variability which is consistent with a a project environment.

Unstable Project Environments

To solve the unstable project environment problem Eli Goldratt went on to develop the Critical Chain method in the 1990s

Throughput in a project environment is understood to be the flow of projects (and their activities) of various degree of: sizes, durations, complexity, uncertainty and novelty.

The Critical Chain method seeks to maximize project environment throughput by managing feeding buffers and capacity buffers within the project and drum buffers and capacity buffers between projects

Product Development Flow (Principles Of Product Development Flow)

Donald Reinertsen developed a parallel set of work to Goldratt that explored and clarified much of the underlying principles of lean product development from the perspective of achieving faster time-to-market in the project production environment.

Reinertsen also defines Design in Process (DIP) in the project production environment since inventory is measured in terms of information in the knowledge work space. The abstract nature of information inventory and visualizing how it flows through a knowledge based work environment has probably been the single largest factor holding back the broader adoption of lean product development.

Although these works provide a vast array of tools it is difficult to see the big picture framework suitable for practical implementation.

Lean Product Development

Ronald Mascitelli’s Mastering Lean Product Development (2011) is perhaps the best integrated framework for the engineering, product development, and R&D leader to establish a throughput managed multi-project production environment. Mascitelli’s framework is an event-driven process incorporating practical lean methods to achieve the goals of improved profitability and new value creation for growth and competitiveness.

Timothy Schipper and Mark Swets published Innovative Lean Development (2010) to describe an equally powerful integrated framework that leverages fast learning cycles and rapid prototyping for project production environments with high uncertainty.

Agile Scrum

The Lean Start-Up

This is the extreme unstable demand case