Principles of Product Development Flow
Don Reinertsen has been providing developers with insightful direction for a number of years. His latest book is a dense, yet passionate argument for adoption of Lean manufacturing principles within new product development projects. His recommendations for tailoring traditional lean methods provides a striking contrast to the 'one size fits all' that have been successfully adopted within manufacturing environments. He does a great job of explaining why adopting Lean techniques within product development activities without these insights can do more harm than good. He provides a rich set of concrete examples about how these ideas and methods can be applied in practice.
Don's biggest emphasis is in these areas:
- Utilizing economics and value as the basis of decisions
- Understanding and confronting variability in each defined process
- The importance of reducing batch sizes in accelerating flow
- Optimizing queue size and service times
- Applying constraints to work-in-progress
- Establishing cadence
- Accelerating feedback
- Decentralizing control
These topics are explored through presentation of a large collection of principles that collectively provide insight about each of these practices, and provide dense, but accessible rationale for their use.
These key features are obviously highly interrelated, and as a result, the wisdom and impact of Reinertsen's work is much greater than the sum of these parts. Don properly treats development as a search for solutions, with all the potential and risk that can bring. His ideas can take your project far beyond what the collection of methods typically described as agile software development can accomplish on their own, since in practice the timeboxing of those methods often result in shedding functionality to meet schedules. This book also provides an excellent theoretical foundation for more practical guidance on lean techniques, such as Kanban boards.
