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The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by [Donald G Reinertsen]

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Donald G. Reinertsen

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development Kindle Edition

by Donald G Reinertsen (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

(4.6) 427 ratings

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"...the dominant paradigm for managing product development is wrong. Not just a little wrong, but wrong to its very core." So begins Reinertsen in his meticulous examination of today's product development practices. He carefully explains why invisible and unmanaged queues are the underlying root cause of poor product development performance. He shows why these queues form and how they undermine the speed, quality, and efficiency in product development.

Then, he provides a roadmap for changing this. The book provides a well-organized set of 175 underlying principles in eight major areas. He shows you practical methods to:

Improve economic decisions
Manage queues
Reduce batch size
Apply WIP constraints
Accelerate feedback
Manage flows in the presence of variability
Decentralize control

The Principles of Product Development Flow will forever change the way you think about product development. Reinertsen starts with the ideas of lean manufacturing but goes far beyond them, drawing upon ideas from telecommunications networks, transportation systems, computer operating systems and military doctrine. He combines a lucid explanation of the science behind flow with a rich set of practical approaches. This is another landmark book by one of the foremost experts on product development.

Print length

290 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
Publication date

May 8, 2014
File size

2612 KB
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Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

“..the dominant paradigm for managing product development is wrong. Not just a little wrong, but wrong to its very core.” Today’s product development orthodoxy is broken. What’s wrong? Companies are pursuing the wrong goals. They maximize capacity utilization, and wonder why cycle times are so long. They strive to conform to plan, and wonder why new obstacles constantly emerge. They try to eliminate variability, and wonder why innovation disappears. They carefully break processes into phases and gates, and wonder why things slow down instead of speeding up. Ironically, each of these actions actually hurts more than it helps.We need a different approach, one based on solid economics and real science. The heart of this approach is FLOW, and the enemy of flow is the invisible and unmeasured queues that undermine all aspects of product development performance. Stagnant piles of idle work lengthen cycle time. At the same time, they delay vital feedback and destroy process efficiency. Yet today, these queues remain unmanaged. Ninety-eight percent of product developers neither measure nor control their queues.But, how can we manage these queues and achieve real flow? It takes a bit of science. We can start with the ideas of lean manufacturing. Then, we must recognize the vast difference between the stable world of repetitive manufacturing and the high-variability world of product development. A product development process must thrive in the presence of variability. Ultimately, we must reach even further, drawing upon ideas from the Internet, transportation systems, computer operating systems, and military doctrine. This is the first book that comprehensively describes the underlying principles that create flow in product development processes, principles that have produced 5x to 10x improvements, even in mature processes. It combines a lucid explanation of the real science behind flow and a rich set of practical methods.Its underlying principles are organized into eight major areas, focusing on practical methods to: • Improve economic decisions • Manage queues • Reduce batch size • Apply WIP constraints • Accelerate feedback • Manage flows in the presence of variability • Decentralize control Nobody is better suited to explain these ideas than Don Reinertsen. In 1997, his landmark book, Managing the Design Factory, first introduced the ideas that have become known as lean product development. His two previous books, Developing Products in Half the Time and Managing the Design Factory, have become required reading for all product developers. For over 25 years he has been recognized as a leading thinker on product development issues.This book begins where other books on product development end. It is guaranteed to change the way you think about product development. The Principles of Product Development Flow is destined to become another product development classic. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About the Author

For 30 years, Don Reinertsen has been a thought leader in the field of product development. In 1983, while a consultant at McKinsey & Co., he wrote the landmark article in Electronic Business magazine that first quantified the financial value of development speed. This article is believed by some observers to have triggered the movement to shorten development cycles in American industry. In 1985, he coined the term Fuzzy Front End to describe the earliest stage of product development. In 1991, he wrote the first article showing how queueing theory could be practically applied to product development.His 1991 book, Developing Products in Half the Time, coauthored with Preston Smith, has become a product development classic. It has been translated into seven languages. His 1997 book, Managing the Design Factory, was the first book to describe how the principles of Just-in-Time manufacturing could be applied to product development. In the 12 years since this book appeared, this approach has become known as lean product development.For 15 years, Don taught executive courses at California Institute of Technology, and he currently teaches public seminars throughout the world. He has a B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell, and an M.B.A. with distinction from Harvard Business School.His company, Reinertsen & Associates, has helped leading companies throughout the world improve their product development processes for over 20 years. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover

The dominant paradigm for managing product development is wrong; not just a little wrong, but wrong to its very core. Stagnant piles of idle work lengthen cycle time, delay vital feedback and destroy process efficiency. Yet today, these queues remain unmanaged. This landmark book defines a new approach, one based on solid economics and real science. It focuses on controlling the invisible and unmeasured queues that undermine all aspects of product development performance. This is the first book that comprehensively describes the underlying principles that create flow in product development processes, principles that have produced 5 to 10 times improvements, even in mature processes. It combines a detailed explanation of the real science behind flow and a rich set of practical methods. Its 175 underlying principles are organized into eight major areas. It begins where other books on product development end, and is guaranteed to change the way you think about product development. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Review

At Accuer, our business depends on helping successful product developers become even better. We need to provide real results, quickly, in lots of different areas. Because we need to stay at the leading edge, I've studied and read almost every book on lean product development; this one is better than the rest of them combined! Why? It's a unique combination of practical methods and clear explanations of the science that makes them work. If you've enjoyed Don's previous books as much as I have, you're guaranteed like this one. ----David W. Paulson, President Accuer, Inc.

This book challenges an awful lot of fashionable ideas on improving product development processes. It provides a vast number of very solid principles that could make a big difference for almost any product development organization, from beginners to the most advanced. It offers a fundamentally different way of thinking about product development processes. Don't read it if you are content with business as usual! ----Andrew Flint, Microsoft Hardware --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00K7OWG7O
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Celeritas Publishing; 1st edition (May 8, 2014)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 8, 2014
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2612 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 290 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #257,056 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #15 in Technical Project Management (Kindle Store)
- #29 in Engineering Project Management
- #37 in Technical Project Management (Books)

Customer Reviews:
(4.6) 427 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

427 global ratings

5 star		75%
4 star		17%
3 star		5%
2 star		1%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from the United States

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Hendrick Mcdonald

The smartest book on project task management I have ever read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 24, 2022

Verified Purchase

I’ve read a few books on project management, Agile/Scrum, and Kanban, but this is hands down the smartest book I have read on the topic of task management. The author focuses on the economic principles behind the theory of constraints and Kanban. The author uses “queuing theory” to give the reader a fundamental understanding of why the authors recommended approach works best. After reading this book I now understand the foundations behind the recommendations of Kanban, which lets me adapt and adjust those recommendations while being aware of what effect theory says that will have on the process, which I’ll need to account for. Highly informative. 👌🏽

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Brett L. Schuchert

Reviewing as I read along, love it so far

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 18, 2014

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I got this book on 2014/06/17 and I've read into Chapter 3.

Chapter 1 is somewhat different from the other chapters in that rather than being a series of principles, it provides an overall view of practice orthodoxy and how many of these closely held beliefs are based on secondary or proxy variables. The chapter continues with an overview of several examples and then summarizes and discusses where things are going in the rest of the book as well as the layout. The first chapter is great. I did expect it to end a bit sooner than it did (I was thinking in terms of self-referential, small batch sizes), but I'm not sure a shorter chapter would have been better.

The second chapter introduces the approach for the rest of the book as well as the model underpinning the principles. The approach works for me. I imagine myself reading this book, going back and creating queue cards for each of the principles, then periodically looking up individual ones and refreshing my memory. It seems like a book I can keep going back to and reading just because I want 5 minutes of good reading.

For some context, I'm a software developer. I learned about the Theory of Constraints (ToC) before I really learned software development processes in depth. When I did being the software process journey, it was under the OO umbrella, so incremental and iterative, feedback, etc. This learning, however, I've recently realized (by first reading Kanban and now this book) was heavily influenced by the ToC. At the beginning of this century, I jumped on the XP and Scrum bandwagons, even working with a few of the original signatories on the manifesto for agile development.

ToC came up a number of times while coaching. Moving from ToC to thinking in terms of Kanban isn't much of a leap to me. However, since I was applying things I learned and internalized, things that seem obvious to me are often not obvious to my customers or even my colleagues (yes, sometimes I'm wrong, but often I'm not). For example, at many, many places I've been, companies claim they are practicing continuous integration or even continuous delivery, but then their builds are broken (red) 80+ % of the time. This is a huge cost to productivity, morale, feedback, etc. This is one example of many such examples that, in in the context of ToC are obvious bottlenecks, which cause queueing. If I look with lean glasses, many of these are worthy of stopping the line, but people march on, building up queues of work to be committed, which lead to more broken builds, integration problems, demoralization, etc.

However, what seems obvious to me doesn't seem obvious to others. More importantly, many people don't even see that there's a problem at all! They think, for example, when developers complain about being blocked due to the build being broken, it's just developers complaining about a minor glitch, but it is more typically a systemic problem.

This books presents a model based on economics. One thing that I observed myself observing about the book was that I thought it might be over emphasizing one dimension, cost of delay, or one approach, economics. However, "all models are wrong, some are valuable." While I had this observation, I didn't find anything wrong about the conclusions, and in fact find my self thinking "yes and," so I've kept reading. So while this model may be wrong in some ways (I'm not aware of any), I clearly see immediate and near-term value for me with its use.

What this model does is allow me to speak to upper management, and maybe middle management using a language they are likely to appreciate. I'm able to justify things like slack using economic models, so that I might be better able to communicate with them. So rather than talking about the flexibility and agility that well under 100% utilization might offer, instead I can discuss the cost of delivery related to high utilization (lack of slack). My primary failing up until now is not being able to explain what seems intuitive to me in a way that bridges the communication gap. This model seems to give me another way to both think about it and communicate it.

I have not finished reading the book, but in the the spirit of small batch sizes, this is my first delivery. I'll be making updates as I read the book. I am already confident that I'll finish this book and that I can recommend it to people. It'll have to really work hard to go under a 5 star review.

Finally (so far): my impression so far reading the book is that it seems well researched, brings together a number of disciplines in a non-trivial manner and seems to come form someone who legitimately has many good years of experience, not just the same 1 year of experience repeated over and over.

25 people found this helpful

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Tom K.

Audacious and Pathbreaking

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 26, 2011

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Donald Reinertsen's latest book on new product development aspires to making a global and historical impact. He systematically applies the theory and best practices of lean manufacturing, economics, queuing theory, statistics, web communications, operating systems, control engineering and military science to the new product development process. He summarizes these insights in 8 themes and 175 principles. Examples and graphs illustrate the concepts.

This is a dense book. The target audience of marketing MBA's, industrial engineers, project and general managers will be challenged. It requires some familiarity with lean manufacturing, economics and operations research. The principles are illustrated but not obvious. The quality, lean manufacturing, Toyota Production System, theory of constraints and technical sources are briefly referenced. The rationale for existing (stage-gate) best practices is not explained. Limits and trade-offs are not discussed.

Nonetheless, this is an audacious and path breaking book. Product development practitioners can learn and apply the principles of this book.
Economics trumps simple versions of quality paradigms. Expected net lifetime value is king. Marginal cost/benefit analysis rules. Global optimums outweigh local ones. Proxy measures undermine optimal economic decision-making. Decisions matter, precision does not. Priority features/competitive advantages matter most. Economic rules of thumb allow decentralized decisions. Cost of delay is managed through an explicit value of time.

Queuing theory manages delays. Project and task cycle times drive the cost of delay. Long queues increase defects, variability and risks. Misplaced high efficiency and utilization goals lead to delays, increased costs and disastrous momentum. Communications links between adjacent processes matter more than bottleneck capacity. Simple views that delays, variability, inventory or waste are evil or have infinite cost lead to bad decisions. Queues are everywhere in product development.

Measure variability with a payoff function. It can be negative or positive. Testing generates information value. Statistics based steps reduce variation, such as smaller tasks and time horizons. Counterbalance and design reuse offset variability. Economic priorities, faster iterations and early high risk actions minimize the impact of variability.
Smaller task batch sizes reduce variability and cycle time, accelerate feedback, improve engagement and reduce risk and overhead. Large batches increase costs, delay progress and may spin out of control. Optimum batch sizes are small and can be found through trial and error. Combine features in separately developed and tested modules. Smaller batches are more beneficial than capacity increases. Large batches impact every step of product development.

Detailed planning and control of tasks is costly. It is more effective to control the work in process between major functions. As with TPS or Theory of Constraints, managing the flow of released product from stage to stage improves final results. Many scheduling, prioritization, resource and recovery strategies can minimize task WIP. A blended generalist/specialist staff skills profile offers flexible capacity.

The flow of activities through product development can be managed. Use forecasts and share information between adjacent stages. Use cadence to set routine start/stop times. Synchronize tasks so that dependent events flow smoothly. Sequence tasks and change priorities based upon risk and incremental economic value added. Build in flexible paths and spare resources.

Develop rapid feedback systems. Employ early warning systems and value at risk triggers to escalate reviews. Align activities through training, incentives and templates. Adjust decisively when required. Use frequent communication to build teams and short queues to build urgency. Employ flow metrics.

Decentralize decision making to speed the flow and avoid management bottlenecks. Provide high level structure in the form of rough-cut plans, rules of thumb, intentions, templates and sequences.

The principles in this book can be applied to any operations or development process. The value added is limited only by the time invested.

7 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

DT

Revolutionary Thoughts on Product Development Management in Bite-size chunks

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 26, 2020

Verified Purchase

I am humbled by the wealth of intellectual thought and pragmatic guidance contained in this easily accessible book by Mr. Reinertsen. His language and layout choices have made it easy even for a Neanderthal such as me to grasp the depth of his thought. He combines academic rigour with simple advice on how to apply the theories in a workplace. In one book he exorcises the superstitions that have led to manufacturing management methods being mis-applied to the very different realm of product development

175 principles to establish or boost the flow of product development by focussing decision-making on economic benefit. Each principle is defined in clear language and then practical examples are used to demonstrate how to apply in your workplace.

As an engineering manager and director, this book has become a guiding light that I return to on a regular basis to mine the gems that Mr. Reinertsen has gathered together.

If you are involved in the management of Product Development teams, this book should be bought, devoured and absorbed into your DNA. Anything less is irresponsible.

One person found this helpful

M. Rhodes

Heavy going.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 22, 2014

Verified Purchase

I was recommended this book by a friend.

However, I found it pretty heavy going. Also I have quite a lot of Agile, Scaled Agile and Program Management experience. (I bought this and several other books to review practices and theories prior to designing training and deployment of Agile to a global team). Whilst I found the theory from this book to be correct, in my experience the models are over-simplistic and cannot be used in real world effectively.

7 people found this helpful

Daniel Kustrin

The missing "why does it work?" manual

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 18, 2013

Verified Purchase

The Principles of Product Development Flow is a remarkable book. It presents in clear and simple language some very interesting and important principles that underpin lean, kanban, project scheduling and, yes, agile.

We all "know" that short releases cycles, quick feedback, prioritised feature sets etc all make sense but do we all know why that is the case? We all "know" how to manage full queues but do we all know that alternatives exists and that they could perhaps help with managing the flow of the delivery stream even better? What about critical chain project management? Why does it work? How about Theory of Constraints? Is it as good as some people think? This book covers it all. Everything you wanted to know about, well, product development flow but were afraid to ask.

One person found this helpful

AgileNick

A very valuable book for agile development

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 22, 2014

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I read this book as part of an agile book club - we all read a book per month and then meet up to share our perspectives on the book chosen.

I did find it a challenge to read, and many parts I had to read twice or more. Had it not been for the group I may have struggled to finish it. There is quite a lot of mathematics in it, which can be difficult for some.

However, the book conveys some very good ideas. The economics give you a common value for making choices between different product development options. The parts on design in process inventory, cost of delay and life cycle profits will help our agile teams to give the best value to the customer.

I really appreciated the differentiation made throughout the book between manufacturing (the basis of a lot of lean thinking) and product development, which has variability, is non repetitive and non-homogeneous.

The chapters on managing queues, exploiting variability, reduced batch size, fast feedback and decentralised control were really informative.

I am really pleased that I have read this book. At times I struggled, but the journey was worth it. I will keep this book on my desk and refer to it often.

2 people found this helpful

Chris Cooney

Dense but Excellent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 18, 2018

Verified Purchase

The book was a bit of a dense read at times and I was running out of steam by the end, but many of the gems that I picked up along the way made the effort more than worth it. Great to read if you're working in any area of technology, but I imagine some of the rules, ideas and approaches in here are also applicable well outside of technology.

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