After success in the factory with lean manufacturing, many companies are applying lean techniques to product development to drive out waste and variation. At the same time, they complain that their products aren’t really new—just makeovers.
This workshop offers a fresh alternative. It recognizes that uncertainty is the essential core of innovation, and rather than trying to “lean” it out, we discover how to embrace change and manage uncertainty. For example, most companies accept the project plan as the roadmap and thus judge project managers relative to how well they follow the plan—deviation is undesirable. But as technologies, customer desires, and management objectives change, what was once considered the right plan may no longer be best.
You learn to introduce flexibility into product development so that you can embrace change, that is, make changes relatively late in the development cycle without undue disruption. In a chaotic world, change then becomes your friend rather than a feared evil. The bonus is that flexibility allows you to introduce the latest ideas into your products in midstream to delight your customers and bedevil your competitors.
This workshop will provide everything you need to implement flexibility in your organization:
How agile software developers have exploited special characteristics of software development to greatly enhance the flexibility of their development methods.
Moving beyond software development, how flexibility tools available to all us, such at product architecture, experimentation and prototyping techniques, and set-based design can be applied to products from footwear to supercomputers.
Strengths and weaknesses of each tool
Areas of application and ways to adapt the tool
Hands-on practice in using the tools and approaches on a case study product development project
See how others apply the tools to the same products to broaden and enrich your experience with the tools
The underlying values of the flexible environment, so that you can cultivate them
Exposure to the weaknesses and pitfalls of flexibility so that you can avoid them
Team leaders and project managers in new product and software development
Managers overseeing product and software development or responsible for improving product development practices
How to get the most from this course
Schedule the session today -- quit procrastinating!
Read Preston Smith's articles on the subject so that you can participate in the workshop at a more advanced level.
Plan to apply what you have learned to a specific project just after the workshop, while the material is fresh in your mind and to reap the benefits as early as possible.
Course outline (click on blue bullets for details)