Reinertsen Masterclass: Lean Product Development

Lean Product Development is about understanding a fundamentally different way to think about and manage New Product Development; but one that can deliver massive process and product benefits. This workshop will enable companies to recognise the importance of Lean NPD as a poweful approach with the 'triple play' potential to simultaneously improve quality, efficiency and cycle time. It also offers incremental bonus savings along the way: for when the principles are understood, relatively simple and straight forward changes in approach can deliver rapid improvements for all projects in the development process. Yet, at present many people have an unclear view of Lean Product Development, and key misunderstandings are preventing companies from exploiting lean methods in product development. This workshop aims to address these misunderstandings, and explore the often difficult challenge of transferring Lean principles to the world of product development. It will also focus on providing practical and economically justifiable approaches for adopting 'Lean Product Development'.

Course Content

Introduction
Companies need to fully appreciate the critical differences between repetitive manufacturing processes and non repetitive development processes, and what this means with respect to the implementation of Lean NPD.
· An overview of how lean techniques improve development speed, quality, and cost
· A framework for differentiating waste and value-added in product development

The Economics of Waste
Within the product development process, the economic importance of different forms of waste can vary by orders of magnitude. Hence, developing a sound economic framework to assess waste is a critical first step.
· How to develop an economic framework to assess waste
· The five forms of economic waste in product development

Understanding Variability
Within product development there is both good and bad variability, and so it is vital that companies can distinguish between them, and know how to deal with both appropriately.
· How to eliminate unnecessary variability
· How to reduce the impact of necessary variability

Managing Capacity
In the product development process excess capacity is NOT a waste. Without this excess, the presence of necessary variability creates large process queues that have a massive negative impact on cycle time, overheads, risk and quality.
· How to measure development queues and quantify their true impact
· Tools for managing queues

Using Batch Size
While the benefits of batch size reduction are well recognised in manufacturing, this approach is dramatically under-utilised in product development.
· The importance of small batch size and how to achieve it
· The ten most common batch size problems in product development
Achieving Cadence
Another key technique only just being recognised by product developers is that of regular process cadence.
· How a regular cadence reduces variance
· Using cadence in product development processes

Using Pull
Most product development processes "push" work through and waste time and effort trying to schedule activities over long time horizons. In contrast, "pull"-based systems smooth flow by locally responding to variance.
· Two practical ways to use "pull" in product development

Exploiting Feedback
Instead of striving to create processes that try to "do it right the first time", product developers should recognise that processes with well-structured feedback loops create spectacular opportunities to smooth flow and attain far greater quality levels.
· How feedback permits development processes to reduce variability
· How well-designed feedback loops can eliminate waste

Controlling Flow
Because different development projects have different costs of delay, this creates an opportunity to use well-designed priority systems to reduce the total cost of queues.
· How dynamic flow control differs from detailed scheduling
· Using economically-grounded methods for setting task and project priorities

Finding Waste
Because product development processes add value in different ways than manufacturing processes, waste is found in different places.
· Ten common areas of product development waste
· A general approach for eliminating waste
· Implementation
· There are a number of factors that are likely to lead to successful implementation.
· How to initiate pilot programs and scale them up
· Strategies for developing a plan for immediate next steps