This snippet is characteristic of Reinertsen's writing style and reasoning. Technical Debt: Adding Math to the Metaphor - R SKMurphy, Inc. The total cost of the subprocess is composed of its cost of capacity and the delay cost associated with its cycle time. One of the challenges that R&D has that manufacturing doesnt is that most of the work is invisible, which makes it difficult to see the queues. Goldratt's Theory of Constraints is invoked along with rate-matching between adjacent processes. Or take this indictment of our worship of efficiency: But, what do you product developers pay attention to? Despite the fact that much of the content has been covered by other texts on Lean and Agile development, Reinertsen brings a rigor to these practices that is often missing from other offerings. Attendees should bring a calculator, since the course will involve some light calculations. Flow is more like an encyclopedia where you can easily find information. Startups are frequently guilty as charged - the 4-year death march example above could be written about dozens of venture-backed companies slogging it out in the land of the living dead. The book is structured as a series of principles, logically laid out and briefly discussed - 175 in all. Today's developers incorrectly try to maximize efficiency Any subprocess within product development can be viewed in economic terms. This is why product development routinely creates disruptive innovation, because our ability to invent new products is limited only (well, primarily) by our capacity for imagination. He prescribes controlling capacity utilization as the best way to manage queue size. It will be particularly useful to companies that are reaching the point of diminishing returns using conventional approaches to product development and lean product development. Learn how to manage and orchestrate development projects following advanced Lean principles. Reinertsen has a visceral anger about all that waste, and his stories are crackling with disdain for the people who manage such systems - especially when their actions are motivated by intuition, voodoo, or blindness. Or consider principle B9: The Batch Size Death Spiral Principle: Large batches lead to even larger batches: The damage done by large batches can become regenerative when a large batch project starts to acquire a life of its own. Six Sigma and Lean thinking encourage us to stamp out variability. We can only know if this is a good trade-off if we quantify both the value of the cycle time and the economic benefit of reduced variability. This means that there are no external factors that argue for shipping product on any given day. J3[$)'Ph=KRZM|aM;z"9dgod A_T#K_U@HpMBOM,wc^dkneYfDfNe LJ3 VQ} 8d^Z)|)@3?-KCN-|`5J-@,lvI>! Z|duXmh;:sLaO)#NMK78|M}qrOsN\ K1P&qjk0X Y!(u'X"7Rc\2-n~ZsT|[_) .yW"]%W=@'PqFS9?)w0a?~&aT;>1l,`Fp${Z:V u)Q18k\:CR2ur.VJZ %{% Creating short feedback loops is nothing new to the Agile practitioner. MDF is more like a typical book thats easy to read. Don Reinertsens third book is called The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. One example offered is that of the bathroom scale purchased to measure weight-loss performance. How to manage this? In this chapter, Reinertsen uses traffic control systems because they must adapt to constantly changing and uncertain conditions accidents happen. Leadership feels obligated to assert their authority, while at the same time sending messages that people at all levels should feel free to make appropriate decisions. We love that at Playbook! If you have been doing agile for a while it is a good way to put your everyday praxis in perspective.". People who work together develop tight communications based on common context and language. There are many causes, but a common one is that work sits idle for long periods of time (in a queue) before its worked on. 0000002588 00000 n Reinertsen, in typical fashion, offers lots of ways to evaluate the characteristics of managing decentralized control by integrating ideas from all the preceding chapters. I buy a lot of booksmore than I have time to read. In this case, it is usually better to do high cost-of-delay jobs first. Vi er specialiseret i SAFe,(Scaled Agile Framework) og erSPCT Gold partner hos Scaled Agile, Inc. He also introduces this idea: when it is imprudent to eliminate variability, the better choice is to minimize its cost. Since few companies can answer both questions, it should be no surprise that queues are managed poorly today. In the manufacturing world, variability is almost always bad. As great as these ideas are, we borrowed a few other methods from other sourcesAgile, and Theory of Constraints. Here we see two different projects in which the same variables have different economic impacts. In a truly new market, we face no meaningful competition, there are no tradeshows to present at, and customers are not clamoring for our product. Only with the proper controls in place does the scale become an effective tool within the system. The following chart shows compelling evidence of the efficacy of WIP constraints. trailer << /Size 232 /Info 214 0 R /Encrypt 223 0 R /Root 222 0 R /Prev 1341855 /ID[<1a5eb9fbc7621f479f718e415c5dd1e8>] >> startxref 0 %%EOF 222 0 obj << /MarkInfo << /Marked true >> /Metadata 213 0 R /PageLabels 210 0 R /Pages 212 0 R /StructTreeRoot null /Type /Catalog /ViewerPreferences << /Direction /L2R >> /AcroForm 224 0 R >> endobj 223 0 obj << /Filter /Standard /R 3 /O (2*c #h e5-J-3T\n) /U ([| ) /P -1340 /V 2 /Length 128 >> endobj 224 0 obj << /Fields [ ] /DR << /Font << /ZaDb 207 0 R /Helv 208 0 R >> /Encoding << /PDFDocEncoding 209 0 R >> >> /DA (v'm}wo) >> endobj 230 0 obj << /S 1030 /V 1343 /L 1365 /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 231 0 R >> stream Sound familiar? Any activity that promotes learning is progress, and productivity needs to be measured with respect to that. Second, what is the cost of these queues? Ill give you time to start reading either of Don Reinertsens books and will cover these other two topics in my next post. Although the book is under 300 pages long, it felt like many 500 page books I have read. It's wonderful to have an author take these sorts of questions seriously, instead of issuing yet another polemic. For example, many startups would do better by removing buffers from their schedules, embracing the variability of their delivery times, and reducing their cycle times. When leadership defines the mission clearly, teams can interpret their situation against that mission to make good choices. Small batches (or short iterations) provide fast feedback (more on this later), but they also have the effect of reducing queue size. While none of these ideas are new, it is valuable to read about them in the context of maximizing economic value. Closely related is the fact that high capacity loading has a serious impact on cycle times. (For an introduction to the topic, I still recommend Reinertsens book Managing the Design Factory.). People often ask which they should read first. Given what I have already said, you can imagine that my attempt will be wholly inadequate, but at least I can try to pique your curiosity. The discussion of creating clear roles and boundaries resonates because too often neither of these is well-defined and clearly communicated in a manner that is actionable by team members at all levels. The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development, by Donald Reinertsen. We often think of product development backlogs as free. Lean Product Development: Where in the world should you begin? hbspt.cta._relativeUrls=true;hbspt.cta.load(510348, '70bd67e2-189b-4307-a150-f9cb1ce99a46', {"useNewLoader":"true","region":"na1"}); Guide to Lean Project ManagementGuide to Lean Product DevelopmentScience and economics behind failing fastLean Product Development the Opportunity of the Century. If you'd like to hear when articles come out, Lean product development can be looked at as flow-based product development. For example, take the lean dictum of working in small batches. 0000001106 00000 n He starts the book with twelve cardinal sins. There got to be so many pages marked that I started putting the stickies on the side of the page so I could tell the new ones from the old ones. Executives coming to my product development classes report operating at 98.5 percent utilization in the precourse surveys. This increased capacity utilization reduces our flexibility, which is mandatory in the unpredictable world of product development. In order to trade them off against each other, we have to convert their impact into economic terms. Reinertsen cautions against mistaking dynamic goals for static goals. But they can be managed by reducing batch sizes. It moves at a rapid clip, each argument backed up with the relevant math and equations:marginal profit,Little's law,Markov processes,probability theory, you name it. After all, when upper management has been told a project will succeed for 4 years, it is very hard for anyone in middle management to stand up and reverse this forecast Our problems grow even bigger when a large project attains the status of the project that cannot afford to fail. To give one example, Reinertsen emphasizes the power of measuring thecost of delay(COD) of a new product. He points out that in the military, field personnel are given a mission, but since conditions on the ground can change rapidly, advantage goes to the fighting force that can adapt the quickest. For example, large test packages bundle many tests together and grow in importance with increasing size. Get started with Lean Product Development, Lean Product Development: Cultural Resistance, 4 ways to Ensure Your Lean product Development Initiative Won't Fail, The planning and task ownership is decentralized, No tasks on the critical path have wait time, You can monitor and control capacity loading. It is what they refer to as the ramp meter.. Good for economically minded people (CFO, CEO, etc. Anyone working in an Agile software development environment is familiar with the benefits of small batch size. This set of principles dispels this misconception. Just show it will benefit the "golden" project and you will get approval. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of options for starting points. We are located only 2 minutes walk from Christianshavn Station and 12 minutes from Copenhagen airport (Kastrup) by metro. Well, heres a partial list of topics you can choose from. Reinertsen draws on a variety of areas (economics, queue theory, control theory, the military) to explore the consequences for product development. 0000000589 00000 n As we already know, congestion for product developers means bigger queues, higher capacity utilization, delays and higher costs. Institutionalization of large batch sizes. Its goal is to help us recognize that every artifact of our product development process is really just a proxy variable. They are not. That is often a bad trade (although, as I'm sure Reinertsen would hasten to add, not always!). Again, you will find some powerful tools to think about how to optimize the use of human and system resources. s-U->8nb4=ry Z[AlE"s m8$cnFv(%Y"Bxj.SY*% How high? First, how big are our queues? To motivate you to buy this book, I want to walk you through some of Reinertsen's indictment of the status quo in product development, which is based on his extensive interviews, surveys, and consulting work. Let me preface this review by stating for the record that I read a lot of non-fiction books. Thank you for being such wonderful hosts absolutely fantastic environment (+ delicious food) to support the learnings.- Sending my husband to the course asap! Achieving Product Development Flow - Learn how to manage and orchestrate development projects following advanced Lean principles, Value Stream Identification Lessons from the wild, The Principles of Product Development Flow, Calculate and use Cost of Delay as the most important key figure in your development process, Find, monitor and control bottlenecks in the process, Shortening lead-time through systematically reducing batch sizes, Create room for innovation, by allowing variation in the process. Each principle gets a page or two of explanations; the diagrams are plentiful and helpful. What we learn from this example is that flow is a product of speed and density. The principles of product development flow draw on insights from Lean Manufacturing as well as examples from the Telecommunications and Computer Operating Systems industries. Yet it's not correct to say that batch sizes should be as small as possible. Clearly, big iterations require big queues. Just for the economic explanations, this book would be worth the price of admission. Much of this chapter is a rehash of concepts that are familiar to anyone who has used Agile or Lean principles: colocation, short iterations, low hanging fruit, and modular design are all discussed. In addition to evaluating the work, a good nonfiction book review also provides a taste of some of the information the reader will gain. Each principle gets a page or two of explanations; the diagrams are plentiful and helpful. Weather happens. Instead, there are a bunch of stories on what individual companies have doneand those stories vary a lot. As importance grows, such test packages get even higher priority. Lean Product Development the Opportunity of the Century. And there are already stories of companies that have tried the wrong things and failed. If the product development team can be engaged in activities that promote business learning at the expense of shipping - or even selling - product, that's a good trade. And if you look closely, you can see I even used an orange card to mark what must have been the final good idea I found. We are now four generations beyond that method." Fast feedback provides a reinforcing cycle that keeps our inventory of design variations low.
reinertsen theories on product development flow