#AgileBelarus #FridayReadingBooks
"Principles of Product Development Flow", Don Reinertsen
It is one of my favorite books. It tries to find solutions for the modern product development questions:
- Failure to Correctly Quantify Economics
- Blindness to Queues
- Worship of Efficiency
- Hostility to Variability
- Institutionalization of Large Batch Size
- Underutilization of Cadence
- Managing Timelines instead of Queues
- Absence of WIP Constraints
- Inflexibility
- Noneconomic Flow Control
- Centralized Control
It seems such problems are familiar not only to product companies, but government and state organizations, firms and even to the governments.
Don Reinertsen is focusing how we can overcome the limitations of the current "reality". He explores eight major themes:
- Economics. Our central premise is that we do product development to make money. This economic goal permits us to use economic thinking and allows us to see many issues with a fresh point of view.
- Queues. Even a basic understanding of queueing theory will dramatically change your perspective on product development. An approach in this book is to give you industrial-strength queueing theory, rather than a more simplified version.
- Variability. Don presents a radically different perspective on the role of variability and how it can be managed. The focus is on how variability is transformed into economic we will focus on how variability is transformed into economic consequences by an economic payoff-function.
- Batch Size. Author discovers that reducing batch size is usually the single most cost-effective way to reduce queues. Smaller batches do this by reducing unnecessary variability in flow.
- WIP Constraints. WIP constraints are a powerful way to gain control over cycle time in the presence of variability. This is particularly important for systems where variability accumulates, such as in product development.
- Cadence, Synchronization, and Flow Control. Cadence involves processing work at regular time intervals. Synchronization involves making multiple tasks start or finish at the same time. We can synchronize with or without cadence. We can use cadence with or without synchronization. It is best when we combine both.By flow control, we refer to the sequence in which we process jobs in our product development process.
- Fast Feedback. The speed of feedback is at least two orders of magnitude more important to product developers than manufacturers. The book is suggesting that feedback is what permits us to operate our product development process effectively in a very noisy environment. Feedback allows us to efficiently adapt to unpredictability.
- Decentralized Control. Decentralization is a logical response to unpredictable situations where response time is important. This occurs in product development, where problems can expand quickly and opportunities can be perishable.
The book can be buyed on
https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow-Generation-ebook/dp/B00K7OWG7O/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2JDEVX9CWRMOS&dchild=1&keywords=principles+of+product+development+flow&qid=1622814696&s=digital-text&sprefix=Principles+of+Product+Development+Flow%2Cdigital-text%2C419&sr=1-1
