| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £9.05
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £9.05, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
"...the dominant paradigm for managing product development is wrong. Not just a little wrong, but wrong to its very core." So begins Reinertsen in his meticulous examination of today's product development practices. He carefully explains why invisible and unmanaged queues are the underlying root cause of poor product development performance. He shows why these queues form and how they undermine the speed, quality, and efficiency in product development.
Then, he provides a roadmap for changing this. The book provides a well-organized set of 175 underlying principles in eight major areas. He shows you practical methods to:
- Improve economic decisions
- Manage queues
- Reduce batch size
- Apply WIP constraints
- Accelerate feedback
- Manage flows in the presence of variability
- Decentralize control
The Principles of Product Development Flow will forever change the way you think about product development. Reinertsen starts with the ideas of lean manufacturing but goes far beyond them, drawing upon ideas from telecommunications networks, transportation systems, computer operating systems and military doctrine. He combines a lucid explanation of the science behind flow with a rich set of practical approaches. This is another landmark book by one of the foremost experts on product development.
About the Author
For 30 years, Don Reinertsen has been a thought leader in the field of product development. In 1983, while a consultant at McKinsey & Co., he wrote the landmark article in Electronic Business magazine that first quantified the financial value of development speed. In 1985, he coined the term Fuzzy Front End to describe the earliest stage of product development. In 1991, he wrote the first article showing how queueing theory could be practically applied to product development.
His 1991 book, Developing Products in Half the Time, coauthored with Preston Smith, is a product development classic. His 1997 book, Managing the Design Factory, was the first book to describe how the principles of Just-in-Time manufacturing could be applied to product development. In the 12 years since this book appeared, this approach has become known as lean product development. For 15 years, Don taught executive courses on product development at California Institute of Technology. He currently teaches public seminars throughout the world.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most management books cover only a few ideas and often at too high a level to be useful in day-to-day work. Flow is different. It covers a lot of ground, more than 150 management principles divided into eight areas. As you can imagine, with this much ground to cover, the prose is terse, to the point, and action oriented.
Flow is not a book for everyone, but if you are serious about management, you should have a copy, and study it carefully.
Flow begins by establishing why a new approach to management is necessary. There are plenty of problems with the most common approaches to management today. Reinertsen discusses them thoughtfully. He approaches management from an economic angle, so it is natural that the first area covered is product development economics. From there, Reinertsen moves on to cover most aspects of product development flow:
* Queues, and the economics of queues
* Variability
* Batch sizing
* Work-In-Process constraints
* Cadence, synchronization and flow control
* The importance of fast feedback loops
* Centralization and Decentralization of control
Flow focuses to a large extent on the technical side of management. Such skills are absolutely necessary for a good manager to have, but they are rarely taught. I recommend The Principles of Product Development Flow to any manager who wishes to increase her understanding of management, and build a practical toolkit for performing it.
As I reflect on the text, I am clear that efforts that I have made to improve Global NPD has drawn on some of the principles listed here. It is good to see a clearly thought through analysis of the problem from somewhere near first principles to back up field experience.
I would recommend this book.
Here's the short version:
- figure out how your projects make money;
- figure out how much it costs when those projects are delayed;
- if the cost of delay is a lot of money then read the rest of the book, starting with the chapters on queuing and batch sizes.
(If the cost of delay isn't significant then you're probably in the wrong business.)
I haven't read many business books like this, so my verdict comes from a... Read more
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
