Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and are privileged to spend some time with Don Reinertsen, who is considered one of the leading thinkers in the field of lean product development and author of numerous books including “Principles of Product Development Flow”

• “Principles of Product Development Flow” book and why there is a waterfall on the front
• Japanese Manufacturing Techniques was the name before it was rebranded as Lean Manufacturing
• Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, hated math and thus preferred to sit on the factory floor and tweak processes, hence it was not a theory driven approach but rather empirically driven
• Need to understand why things work so you can transfer it to other domains, a big shortcoming in lean manufacturing is that they don’t have much of a mathematical view on what they are doing
• You can use magic in manufacturing because it is highly repetitive
• People understand iterations are good to do but do not understand why
• “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
• Agile software people are doing a better job at lean product development because software people have already crossed the chasm of inspect and adapt
• There are many sources of variability other than just people, such as the Internet and the fact we are constantly doing things people have not done before
• To get management to listen about cost of delay you need to benchmark what you are doing today
• Agile eliminated the economic gene, hence it works well bottom-up
• Easiest way to introduce quantitive based decision making is to find a project manager who wants an economic model (as they will be fighting for resources and the guy with the numbers will end up winning because they can communicate their needs)
• Lifecycle pretax profit is far more useful than ROI
• Start with Chapter 1 in the book – describes what is wrong with what we are doing today, then look for the tree that is ready to be pushed over in your organisation as there is no one way of approaching this
• The low hanging fruit is: visual control boards, economic model, batch size reduction and WIP constraints
• The first knob to turn is batch size reduction
• It is 175 principles in small little batches that add value, it is not the ten commandments!
• YOW! 2015 talk “Thriving in a Stochastic World“

TheAgileRevolution-123 (38 minutes)