Flexible Product Development : Building Agility for Changing Markets

by Smith, Preston G.

• ISBN13: 9780787995843
• ISBN10: 0787995843
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-28
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass

Summary

In this landmark book, Preston Smith attributes the recent decline in innovation to pressure from financial markets that drives management toward rigid development approaches such as phased development processes, Six Sigma, and project office. These processes have unintentionally (but effectively) made changes during development more difficult, disruptive, and expensive, while the need for change continues at an accelerating pace. Flexible Product Development is a hands-on resource that provides the tools and strategies needed to restore flexibility to any organization and remove the obstacles that stand in the way of responsive new product development. Preston Smith introduces approaches that can enhance development process flexibility by creating and maintaining development options, delaying decisions, and, in general, reducing the cost of change. Step-by-step, he explains the basics of flexible product development, provides a broad array of flexibility-enhancing tools, and guides the reader in modifying the organizations values to embrace this new way of operating.

Author Biography

Preston Smith is a leading thinker in the product development community and consults with companies as diverse as Herman Miller and Welch Allyn. His book, Proactive Risk Management, won the David I. Cleland Project Management Literature Award from the Project Management Institute. Smith is book review editor of the Journal of Product Innovation Management and is a Certified Management Consultant.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. xi
Understanding Flexibility	p. 1
Dealing with Change	p. 2
How Much Flexibility?	p. 7
The Roots: Agile Software Development	p. 12
Moving from Software to Other Products	p. 25
A Note of Caution	p. 26
The Project Analyzer	p. 27
Summary	p. 29
Customers and Product Requirements	p. 31
The Fallacy of Frozen Requirements	p. 31
The Value of Customer Feedback	p. 34
Specify at a Higher Level	p. 40
Anticipate Customer Needs	p. 47
Pitfalls of Customer Feedback	p. 52
Summary	p. 54
Modular Product Architectures	p. 57
Modular versus Integral Architectures	p. 58
Examples of Architectural Choices	p. 64
Architectural Approaches	p. 72
Four Steps in Designing an Architecture	p. 75
Architectural Decisions	p. 78
Architecture at the Design Level	p. 81
Shifting the Hardware-Software Boundary	p. 83
Summary	p. 83
Experimentation	p. 85
Kinds of Experiments	p. 86
The Value of Failure	p. 87
Exploration as Experimentation	p. 90
Front-Loaded Prototyping	p. 94
Testing	p. 104
Summary	p. 106
Set-Based Design	p. 107
What Is Set-Based Design?	p. 108
Benefits of Set-Based Design	p. 114
Managing Set-Based Design	p. 115
Delaying Decisions	p. 118
The Difficulties	p. 122
Summary	p. 124
Development Teams and People Factors	p. 125
Teams and Flexibility	p. 127
Having the Right People	p. 128
Desirable People Qualities	p. 132
Team Qualities	p. 137
Summary	p. 152
Decision Making	p. 153
Improving Decision-Making Flexibility	p. 154
People and Decisions	p. 158
Uncertainty and Decisions	p. 161
Decision Trees	p. 162
Real Options Thinking	p. 173
Summary	p. 175
Project Management	p. 177
Flexible versus Mainstream Project Management	p. 178
The Role of a Flexible Project Manager	p. 182
Project Planning	p. 185
Timeboxing	p. 190
Project Risk Management	p. 191
Project Metrics	p. 195
Project Retrospectives	p. 200
Summary	p. 203
Product Development Processes	p. 205
Emergent Processes	p. 205
The Essentials of Flexible Processes	p. 209
Balancing Structure with Flexibility	p. 215
Bottlenecks and Queues	p. 221
Useful Concepts from Agile Software Development	p. 226
Summary	p. 230
Implementing Flexibility	p. 231
Five Paradoxes	p. 233
Transitions Are the Crux	p. 237
Top-Down Change	p. 239
Bottom-Up Change	p. 244
Summary	p. 248
Closing	p. 248
Notes	p. 251
Bibliography	p. 267
Customer Council	p. 273
The Author	p. 275
Index	p. 277
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