About Lean Product Development
What Is Lean Product Development?
Lean Product Development takes a holistic approach to making improvements to product development. This includes the NPD process itself, how NPD is done, and how it is managed to achieve improved business results.
Lean Product Development focuses on eliminating waste and waiting time in the development process, improving how projects teams work together, front loading cross functional project team resources, and focuses on improving organizational alignment on the most important projects to work on for achieving the businesses goals.
Front Loading Resources Improves Project Speed & Reduced Risks
Whether your goals are:
Revenue Growth and Profit Margin Improvements through differentiated products
Cost reductions for increased profitability
Quality improvements for competitive positioning purposes
Gaining ground on leading competitors with increased market share
Furthering industry leadership
Lean Product Development is a method and a mind-set about how to improve New Product Development. The life blood of businesses.
Why Lean Product Development?
There is a great deal of waste in most businesses New Product Development efforts today. One way of looking at this waste is to consider how much time in a typical developers’ day is spent doing value-added work, vs non-value added but required time and pure waste.
It is estimated that in many businesses, developers spend as little as 20% of their day doing value added activities… actually moving the design forward. The rest of their time is spent doing non-value added but required activities such as preparing presentations and reports, going to unproductive team meetings, preparing for management updates, preparing archival documents of little value, or their time is spent doing wasteful activities such as redoing work resulting from project loopbacks due to errors and incorrect assumptions, waiting for handoffs from team members, having queues in the flow of work, constant interruptions, distracting emails, receiving poor quality hand-offs, and doing excessive multi-tasking.
If a business could double the value-add time of the typical developer, which is achievable, that means twice as many projects in the same amount of time, or project cycle times cut in half. Achieving and maintaining “Speed to Market” improvements can become a differentiating competitive advantage for companies, leading to revenue growth, increased market share, and improved profitability.