Articles tagged Product development

Agile, Agile 2, and Agility, Part 1

Guest Post by Howard Wiener (first posted on CERM ® RISK INSIGHTS – reposted here with permission)

If you are running a business today using Agile methods, it’s likely that you are not getting the productivity boost from it that you should, and your time to market for new features is probably not what it could be either.

Is that the end of the world? By and large, yes! The problem is that your impaired delivery capabilities have a substantial impact on your business agility. How is that? Your digital development process is at the center of your product management capability and if you can’t iterate quickly enough it will limit the opportunities for your product managers to redirect the evolution of your products while they’re in development. When you are in a hurry to get new or updated products to market, they will be less evolved, less marketable and less competitive.

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by Robert Allen Leave a Comment

Demystifying Business Requirements

In a previous article, we compared and contrasted the definition of a requirement, with a ‘story’, which is used in agile/scrum. In that article, we stated: “requirements and stories establish a clear understanding of customer needs in the context of desired functionality”.

What if we want to establish a clear understanding of a customer’s needs in the context of desired business functionality? The customer can be an internal or external customer, business functionality can be a business process (IT-enabled or otherwise).

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by Robert Allen Leave a Comment

Tiered Meetings Structure Enables Production Oversight & Support

A complex production process requires a mixture of leadership, governance and management. In this article, we’ll discuss a tiered meetings structure that can effectively enable this. Empowerment, escalation paths, accountability and responsibility are included as some key ingredients. We’ll start with the following diagram:

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by Robert Allen 1 Comment

Benefits of Comparing Lean/Kaizen with Agile/Scrum

Our previous article covered the benefits of comparing the DMAIC problem solving thought process with project management. The key takeaway was DMAIC can be more effectively executed using “measure & plan” phase.

Now let’s compare and contrast agile/scrum with lean/kaizen. While agile is primarily used in software development, there are many valid comparisons. By making this comparison, those familiar with kaizen will improve their understanding of agile and vice-versa. Also we’ll cover key success factors that are applicable to both.

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by Robert Allen Leave a Comment

Benefits of Comparing Agile with Waterfall

Previous articles have covered a proposed waterfall product development phase/gate process. This article will compare and contrast waterfall with Agile product development, especially with respect to the front-end of the process.

Let’s start with a proposed waterfall product development phase/gate process. (The process below implies a hardware product, however, it can be considered any waterfall process for now.)

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by Dennis Craggs Leave a Comment

Quality Costs

Introduction

Businesses, to be competitive, need to control all costs. Product or service failure can result in large uncontrolled costs. As product development proceeds, the cost of failures increases. The concept is shown in figure 1.

Figure 1

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by Robert Allen 2 Comments

Design for Lean

In this article series, we covered several topics in the area of product development and project management. We will now begin to explore process improvement with the topic “Design for Lean”. While design for lean may be a subtopic within product development, it helps us understand operational risks, operational costs, enables operational planning and process improvement.

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by Robert Allen Leave a Comment

Critical Thinking for Product Development

Previous articles have covered product development tools and methodologies such as lean product development, agile, design for six sigma, product life cycle (PLC) and project management processes.

In this article, lets consider “the product” being developed any hardware product, software, IT system, service or new business process. We’ll use the acronym “PSSBP” (Product, Service, Software, Business Process) as an all-encompassing placeholder and to illustrate critical thinking on the topic as follows:

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by Robert Allen Leave a Comment

Project Governance and Resource Management

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:

the quantity of estimated resources is accurate
the resource role requirements are clear and precise
the resources meet or exceed the expectations (requirements)
the resources are added in a timely manner
cost of the resources is minimized to the extent possible

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by Robert Allen Leave a Comment

What is Lean Product Development (Part I)?

Lean product development might mean different things to different organizations, but let’s start with the 5 principles of lean manufacturing and see how it can be applied to the product development process. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

The Quality Triangle and Reliability

The quality triangle is an admission that every project has design constraints. Note that reliability is rarely listed directly within the triangle, yet reliability does impact each element of the triad.

In a world where the design team is beset with numerous design for X priorities, understanding how reliability related to the top three and most common set of constraints is imperative.

For any set of priorities, you should be able to convey how addressing reliability performance in the design and assembly process impacts those priorities. Addressing reliability can improve quality, reduce the risk of launch delays, and reduce the cost of a product. All this and improve customer satisfaction as well.

Let’s explore a few ways you can connect reliability priorities to the common quality triangle priorities. [Read more…]

by Robert Allen Leave a Comment

Ideation and Product Development

In recent articles I focused on a ‘linear’ approach to product development by understanding customer needs, establishing requirements (“what the design provides”), establishing a conceptual design, etc.

In this article, I’ll discuss a framework whereby an idea for a product or design might kick-off the process.

Also, rather than a commercialized product, we will assume our goal is to successfully demonstrate the idea’s feasibility. (This is common for a start-up company, where the business model might be to demonstrate product success with a goal of obtaining more venture capital, or to sell the intellectual property. Alternatively, a large company might want a separate idea development process that takes invention off the critical path.)

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by Robert Allen 2 Comments

Enabling Customer Value in Product Design

Use an Integrated Approach in the Product Life Cycle Process to Enable Customer Value

Given our primary goal of developing a profitable product, our objective in the design process is to maximize customer value and minimize cost. From a financial analysis standpoint: we pursue products with the highest possible margins (ie. charge the customer “as much” as possible, and make the product for “as little” as possible). Of course we also want to sell “as many” as possible. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

The Quality Triangle and Reliability

How Does Reliability Fit with the Quality Triangle?

The Quality Triangle provides a method to establish priorities for a project. It strives to balance time, cost, and quality (or scope instead of quality). It does not include reliability.

Now I am a bit bias as a reliability engineer and believe a projects set of priorities should explicitly include reliability performance. Of course, there are many potential priorities, yet reliability certainly can make or break a product, it’s market acceptance, and an organization’s profitability.

So, given a quality triangle based set of priorities, how does reliability fit in? [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

The Case of Drones

Guest post by Dr. Amir Segal & Yizhak Bot of BQR

Introduction

Reliability engineers are equipped with an arsenal of techniques (FTA, RBD, Markov, FMEA / FMECA, SIL) for reliability, availability, safety and maintainability analysis. However, it is not always clear when to use each technique.
In order to design a safe and reliable product, reliability engineering techniques should be integrated with the system design process. This fact is well known, and today many system engineering conferences include discussions regarding reliability and safety [1,2]. [Read more…]