So what has happened to Lean Product Development and Lean Design? I had mentioned Allen Ward previously and his pioneering work in the area of Lean Development. Allen unfortunately passed away several years ago ( a tribute to his work) and his torch; I believe has best been picked up by Michael Kennedy who has written several books on the subject. The picture below was created from his book,Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota’s System is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It and represents the change gap between past product design and future product design. As you can see design and innovation pulls from the expertise of the workers (knowledge-based) rather than management creating direction (structured).
This is Lean Design of the future. If you envision the Business Model Canvas of Alex Osterwalder’s as the value stream, you will see how Lean is poised to create the eco-system that is need for new product/service development. It is Lean Thinking, that culture of PDCA embedded in the workforce that creates the pull and the resulting flow from and with the customer. This is how demand is created. Without the existing culture, the existing eco-system every product has to be a breakthrough. Even Apple understands, watch this video.
P.S. I agreed with so much of what this guy says that have to admit that I think he is brilliant!
Are we there yet? The last few years we are now seeing implementation of the Lean 3P principles of Design. Development of the 3P process is attributed to Chichiro Nakao, a former Toyota group manager and the founder of Shingijutsu company. The accepted meaning of 3P is Production, Preparation, Process. Toyota delivers product designs on schedule 98% of the time (as stated by @flowchainsensei on twitter). Now, I am not sure how I can confirm this statement except that I believe this source to be accurate and even if Bob was 50% wrong, it would mean Toyota still exceeds the majority. However, after interviewing Allan R. Coletta, author of a new book The Lean 3P Advantage: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Production Preparation Process and reading the book, I can understand and believe that statement. This is an excerpt from the book:
Lean 3P is a powerful enabler for invention and innovation because it creates a structure and a process for people to create both independently and collaboratively. However, 3P is not presented as a “one size fits all” means of creating brilliant new products that takes us from “blue sky” to product launch. It might work like that in some instances where a new product is a variation of an established product or in organizations where the same team is inventing, developing, and working together to launch a new product. With additional experience the role of 3P in the full product development will likely expand. For companies new to Lean 3P, the question might be how 3P will integrate into existing product development processes.
I highly recommend learning more about Lean 3P and the best place to start is with the podcast and/or eBook with Alan:
Podcast: Lean 3P is PDCA on Steroids, eBbook: Introduction to Lean 3P Design Process
I would follow up that with listening or reading the post with Ron Mascitelli, president of Technology Perspectives. Lean Design interview with Ron Mascitelli. Ron is the author of five books, his most-recent publication, Mastering Lean Product Development: A Practical, Event-Driven Process for Maximizing Speed, Profits, and Quality.
Podcast: Lean Design interview with Ron Mascitelli, eBook: Lean Design and Development
Before the podcast, I had been struggling on how, or even if I should use Stage Gates or Control Points in the Lean Service Design methodology. I questioned Ron about this. In an excerpt from the podcast, he explains how he has eliminated them.
Joe: That’s an interesting take on it, because it’s not necessarily a Kaizen event?
Ron: No. Other than the fact Kaizen events are a great example of how powerful this kind of intensive collaboration with a high focus can be. But it’s not a Kaizen event in the classical sense of being continuous improvement. It is an execution event, where you have, again, a standard preparation in advance. Everyone, within their role, comes to this very cross functional event with preparation, information, and in some cases completed work. When we get in the event, we follow an agenda of tools, discussion, and prioritization. Then ultimately, we have a standard output that determines the close of the event.
In fact, if we don’t close the event properly, if we don’t reach that outcome, we reconvene in a week or whenever we can, and we continue until we can reach that closure.
I think it’s a very powerful forcing function for timely decision making and for really getting all the voices together, looking at the same issues and problems, and answering the same question.
Joe: Do these happen at phase gates or control points of the process, then?
Ron: Actually, in my perfect vision of the world, the events become the phases and gates. Our market requirement event is a knowledge gate, so is our project planning event. The rapid learning cycle event, which is to burn down your early risk on a project, each of these, in a sense, are knowledge gates. So in my perfect word, we don’t use artificial governance gates like concept freeze gate and a detail design freeze gate or whatever they might be. We actually use these events as knowledge gates. But in most companies that already have a comfortable language of governance, we just embed the event at the appropriate phase and it will give you the outputs you need for your existing gate reviews.
Joe: So it’s really a way of distributing all the knowledge that needs and deciding on what knowledge you need to proceed with. Is that a simple explanation of it?
Ron: Perfect, perfectly well said. If you think about it, in product development all of the knowledge that is needed to create the best commercial product in the world resides in the heads of the cross?functional groups that you have in your company. It’s all in there somewhere. All they need is a problem to focus on and the ability to somehow pull all of that diverse cross?functional knowledge together in a way that’s optimal. So really that’s what we’re trying to get at here. Really, it’s forcing collaboration, not just names on a list, “Oh yeah, we’ve got a manufacturing person on the team. See here’s Joe, he’s listed down here on the list.”
It’s getting them in the room, break down the barriers to communication, have a common vision and a common set of tools they use so that we really do get that consensus input. Product development can’t be optimized without the contribution of virtually every function in the firm at one time or another.
Ron’s book is Mastering Lean Product Development
We have moved from stage gate thinking across the top of the page to Event style collaborative agreement on a regular basis. These process can even be done concurrently to speed up the process depending on available personnel. Ron, also advocates that you don’t change the tools you are accustomed to using. If you reflect on the discussions about Leader Standard Work, you will once again see the commonality of overlapping responsibility and the practice of arriving at agreement, a consensus of what is best practice. This can only be done through involvement at all levels of the organization. We will discuss this more in the Hoshin section later this month.
This is not about relinquishing control of the design process. It is about gaining more control over implementation. Collaboration does not insure the best answer gets enacted. It typically insures that something does get enacted. It takes away that paralysis from planning. No longer are we trying to gather buy-in to get something accomplished, but rather change is being driven from the bottom up with a sense of joint accountability. The best answer becomes the best implementable action. Eventually through continuous improvement a better answer will surface than was originally conceived.
Extra Material:
Chesbrough is to open innovation what Christensen is to innovation in general, and his concepts and ideas are spot on. Chesbrough is the executive director of the Haas Center for Open Innovation, rethinks the concept of open innovation to tackle a new economy.
In his new book, Open Services Innovation, Chesbrough offers the tools to apply service-focused innovation to avoid what he calls “the commodity trap.” Chesbrough explains,”Innovating in services is the escape route from the commodity trap and a solution for growth, giving firms a significant competitive advantage. As they innovate into the future, companies must think beyond their products and move outside their own four walls to innovate.”