Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
This article series will help guide organizations in optimizing the value of products being developed, while minimizing both development and operational costs.
Consider the “wasted energy” during product development on products that don’t meet customer needs or product requirements. Multiple prototypes, rework and redesigns are often needed, and substantial time and effort is typically invested post-development to reduce product costs.
These articles aim to address this problem by enhancing readers' understanding of product development, project management and process improvement tools and methodologies.
With these disciplines, company culture and competitiveness can be significantly improved by leveraging skilled, efficient teams and collaborative problem-solving.
Sign up for the “Product Development and Process Improvement” email list to receive weekly articles.
In this article, we’ll compare and contrast the definition of a requirement, with a ‘story’, which is used in agile/scrum.
The framework for each is somewhat different, however.
Recall the definition of a requirement:
…a requirement defines “what the product (or process) design shall provide <output> at operating conditions <input>”
The framework of a story is as follows:
In this weeks article, we’ll explore how the three disciplines (product development, process improvement and project management) can enable change management.
First, it’s worth reflecting on how these disciplines fit together. Starting with product development our goal is to understand customer value, and to optimize the product (or service) by maximizing customer value and minimizing cost. It can be seen that, process improvement naturally complements this objective as way to further reduce costs. In addition, project management establishes how product development and process improvement is planned, executed, controlled and monitored.
Now let’s look at some key attributes of change management, along with elements of the three disciplines mentioned above.
All projects or programs have a formal or informal resource management process, with the goal of completing projects on time, within budget and with good project quality.
In order to meet this goal, the resource management objectives are:
In a previous article, we explored agile product development with a focus on early product validation.
In this article, we’ll compare and contrast the role & responsibility for scrum masters vs. project managers/core team leaders.
Let’s start with (all) the basic scrum roles:
Many companies pursue a product development strategy that provides a product (or service) which meets customer needs sooner (rather than later), and then makes adjustments after the product has been fielded.
Pursuing this approach means accepting the associated risks. What if a critical to quality or critical to reliability characteristic fails to meet customer needs? A product could fail miserably by eliminating important product development work scope and accelerating time-to-market. By the time an adjustment or “pivot” can be made it may be too late, or too costly to correct.
In my previous article, we reviewed the project approval committee, and emphasized approval to start projects and/or approve projects in-process.
With any type of project oversight, presentations or project schedules are often reviewed.
“Definition of done” is the agreed-upon evidence of completion of a process, activity or milestone and usually includes a project deliverable. Some examples of deliverables might include the project plan, project schedule, documents (requirements document, plans, and reports), analysis, and designs (drawings). Other considerations can be built-into “definition of done” including compliance, acceptance/sign-off, exceptions and best practices.
Committees may be known as a project review or steering committee; however, consider the following (proposed) objectives as follows:
In my last article, we reviewed a proposed Product Life Cycle process, which starts with a “Define” phase. In the “Define” phase, we are defining the project as well as the product.
We previously discussed the ‘technical leg’ of this process with the market analysis, identifying customer needs, product requirements, verification and validation, etc. [Read more…]
In my previous article we covered the advantages of a phase and gate structure for new product development. Now we can discuss some proposed phase names for a new product development or product life cycle (PLC) process.
An organization may have an existing PLC process ‘baked-in’ to their culture and process documentation. Accordingly, there’s a wide range of PLC phase names, all of which are likely acceptable and based on solid reasoning.
In previous articles we defined an element of lean as a phase and gate structure for new product development. This assumes a waterfall approach to the project (versus agile product development).
A new product life cycle phase gate structure might entail, for example: “Definition, Concept, Design, Verification, Qualification, Production and End-of-Life”. (Your organization might decide on different phase names.)
There’s an apparent contradiction in using a waterfall project approach and calling it lean project management, however. A goal of any lean process is to work toward ‘single piece’ or continuous flow: agile product development is more like ‘single piece flow’ of information, versus waterfall which is more like ‘batch processing’ of information.
My last article covered a scalable model for lean product development depending on the number of projects and technical objectives.
Let’s start with the foundational elements from this model:
In my previous article we established the lean product development goal statement as:
We then derived high-level objectives as follows:
In my previous article, we established some high-level objectives for lean product development as follows:
In my last article the high level goal of lean product development was established as follows:
Develop products that maximize customer value and minimize product cost, in the least amount of time, and at the least amount of product development cost.
Let’s analyze this goal statement and establish some high-level objectives. [Read more…]
