Recent posts have talked about Systems thinking and introduced the concept of The Product Development Operating System framework.
I’d like to present one subsystem of The Product Development Operating System, that being the Workflow subsystem. In a previous video in this series we talked about how companies evolve into The Product Development Operating System. I’d like to use the workflow subsystem to demonstrate that.
When a company is founded an entrepreneur will have an idea that fills a market need. He or she will hire some engineers to work on this idea. The engineers will develop the design and work directly with the entrepreneur to bring the product to market. This exercise of product development is raw innovation — just bringing a new idea to market through the innovation that is usually done within the product development process.
If the organization is successful and survives, it will grow. As it grows in size and complexity there becomes a need to organize the members of product development into functional groups. Simultaneously there arises a need to provide coherent management and leadership for the engineers. This is the second element of the workflow subsystem – Leadership. As it evolves, you now have a Workflow subsystem for Innovation and a subsystem for Leadership.
As an organization is more successful it will have more opportunity for market penetration, but it will have limited resources. So, it needs to make careful investment decisions about which projects it will develop and which opportunities it will forego. These Investment Decisions are the third step in the evolution in the workflow of product development.
When all three Workflow subsystems have been created, you will have a part of the organization making Investment Decisions, which then triggers work to be done by the Leadership of product development to organize efforts that will generate Innovation within a project that will deliver a product to the market.
Investment Decisions, Leadership, and Innovation. Those are the three parts of the Workflow of The Product Development Operating System.
Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive.
Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking
Today we’re going to talk about the Information Flow subsystem of EAC’s Product Development Operating System.
Pre-1980 there were no IT groups and there were no great numbers of knowledge workers. With the emergence of the computer and the dawning of the information age there was an explosion of IT tools that transformed business systems. In the product development business system these tools initially focused on helping the individual. We had CAD and CAM tools for helping mechanical and electrical engineers. We had tools that applied synthetic annealing to optimize optic design. And we had tools that helped simulate or analyze the designs that came forward.
More recently there’s been an emergence of more complex tools that facilitate product development — Product Data Management, tools for collecting and archiving project information, and a variety of tools that help support decision making in product development.
Product development is a knowledge centric function of the organization, but the topic of knowledge management itself is one that spreads in a lot of directions. If we look at the IT backbone that supports knowledge management; that topic converges on a small number of complex, connectable, but functionally focused IT systems.
We’re all interested in making informed decisions. That being decisions that are supported and influenced by accurate real-time information. This requires the ability to get the appropriate information to the decision maker at the right place, at the right time. This is the goal of the Information Flow subsystem.
This Information Flow subsystem is also a subsystem of your IT system. In both of these systems there are two critical jobs for the subsystem. The first is to support the goals of that system itself. The second is to look at the interaction between this subsystem and the other subsystems within its parent system; those being the IT System and The Product Development Operating System.
Here at EAC we’ve been devising a visual model to help you remember The Product Development Operating System. In this model the Information Flow subsystem is the foundation. It’s so critical that it supports the rest of the system. In knowledge centric product development a strong information flow is critical to inform the decisions that are made in both the Workflow subsystem and the Continuous Improvement subsystem. Without it, we have nothing.
Contact EAC to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive.
There’s a lot of buzz these days about leveraging the internet and the ‘cloud’ for business — especially in the realms of product development. Phrases like Internet of Things (IoT), Machine 2 Machine, Product as a Service, Internet of Everything, Cloud Things, Connected Products and others get thrown around daily. Regardless of the term you use, the real intent of any of these IoT projects is to generate some additional value. That could be from more capability, deeper customer interaction, predictive maintenance, new revenue streams, market share, knowledge of how the product is being used or many other scenarios. I thought it would be fun to leverage it for gardening!
This time of year, there are a lot of northern gardeners are doing a dance with garden plants they’ve started from seed while winter was still rolling along. Now the seedlings want to be outside in the sun, but its too cold at night. The plants are getting crowded and too big to park in a window in the living room. Build a plastic tent outside as a make-shift greenhouse and it’s too hot during the day. So you’re left with shuffling the plants inside and outside to follow the spring sun and avoid a late frost. But how do you balance this while keeping your day job?
Enter the IoT and a little project in our parking lot… With a little creativity, some parts we had around and a few extra parts from the thrift store, we built an ‘almost’ free greenhouse we can monitor through any web-browser. Our interest at first is simply to monitor the temperature, relative humidity and light level both inside and outside the greenhouse. It’s fun to see the values ebb and flow with the day and with the weather. This was achieved through an Ethernet connected Arduino wired to a photoresistor and a pair of DHT11 Digital Humidity and Temperature sensors. Currently the system feeds into ThingSpeak for graphical representation with plans to port it over to ThingWorx in upcoming days.
Since the sun is hot this time of year but the cold weather isn’t over, we’ll likely experience some high temperature spikes and some cold nights that could damage the tomatoes. This brings up phase 2 — ‘control.’ Our near term plans are to have powered ventilation and heating to kick in either by reaching through the internet or with the internal controller. Eventually we’ll get to a fully autonomous greenhouse that manage temperature, have sensors in the soil monitoring moisture and turning on/off soaker hoses and misting fans all the while keeping us informed on a smart phone. Those are going to be happy tomatoes with their own twitter account…
Maybe all this tech and automation will take some of the fun out of gardening and fiddling with the plants to get it ‘just right’. What’s more likely is that it will just encourage the acquisition of more plants and the need for a bigger garden and a bigger greenhouse with more automation — but that would be fun too…
EAC Product Development Solutions is a Minnesota based company providing engineering and product development software, service and consulting to the discrete manufacturing industry. With 20 years of product development experience, EAC is seeking to help companies that desire to get more from their products through the IoT. We engage in all aspects of product strategy, product design and enabling technology to achieve those goals. Please contact Rob at rmiller@eacpds.com to find out more.
I’d like to talk about systems thinking in the context of your overall product development operation.
At EAC we’ve developed a framework that we use to analyze the operation of product development at our customers and clients. Our Product Development Operating System, this framework, is broken down into three subsystems. The first is an Information Flow subsystem. The second is a Workflow subsystem. The third is a Continuous Improvement subsystem. The Information Flow subsystem is analyzed as a whole, but the other two are broken down into subsystems of their own.
Within the Workflow subsystem we have an Innovation subsystem, a Leadership subsystem, and an Investment decision subsystem. In the all-important, critically important but often missing, Continuous improvement subsystem — we break that into Expertise, Learning, and Strategy. All of the elements of this system are critically important for your system to operate optimally. If you have a missing or sub-optimal subsystem, the effectiveness and productivity of your overall product development system will diminish.
So let me challenge you. Look at your product development system. Look at it through this framework — through Information Flow, through Innovation, through Leadership, through Investment Decisions, through Development of Expertise, through learning, and through strategy. Are any of these elements in your operation either ineffective or missing? If they are missing, or ineffective, don’t be too concerned. Moving to a product development operating system is an evolution. Your evolution simply may not be complete.
In fact, look to other materials in this series called the Product Development Operating System Evolution. That will give you both a mental model to reinforce your knowledge of the system and some insights into how to evolve your system to one that is more effective and productive.
Contact EAC ( https://www.eacpds.com/eacpdtcontact ) to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive.
Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking
Here at EAC we view Product Development as a system. This stands in counterpoint to the traditional western way of looking at product development as a process. In fact when we promote product development as a system, and that thinking as being more important than looking at it as a process, we often get head scratching in return.
Western traditional management likes to break work down into small pieces and delegate them as tasks. It reduces work into a set of repeatable steps. In some parts of the business that’s wonderful. Think of manufacturing or any area where the process is transactional and non-variable. In those instances process thinking is terrifically beneficial. We can take repeatable steps and proceduralize them because we know if we follow steps exactly we will get consistent output results. Think again of the manufacturing line or something mundane like washing the dishes. You clear the table, scrape the scraps into the wastebasket, rinse the plates to see if anything is baked on or caked on, and then you load the dishwasher and push the button. Then you return later and you get the desirable, repeatable, results of clean dishes.
When we moved to this mental model of product development as a process or process thinking, at first it was advantageous. We brought in patterns of behavior. We broke product development down to milestone phases. It was advantageous to provide guidance to project managers as they trek through milestone phases. But, as issues arose additional management responsibilities and details were added to the process. The focus of product development / project management shifted from the creation of market based value to an administrative checklist — checking the steps you’ve actually accomplished in your product development process.
The way we now implement stage-gate process in product development has made it almost impossible to have a successful project. The antidote to that is to start applying systems thinking. Systems thinking is based upon, not a collection of elements in a system but, the interaction of the elements of the system — the dynamic. We see people, processes, teams, technology, and tools all as elements in the product development system. The operational dynamic between these elements is what determines the quality of your workflow, your information flow, and if you’ve embraced it, your continuous improvement operation inside of product development.
If your product development environment is characterized by conflict and hostility, then you’re probably locked into a restrictive and constrictive process thinking approach to product development. Shift your thinking from that linear process thinking — Task, Complete, Task, Complete — to the closed loop ideas of systems thinking where you have feedback loops and mutual cause and effect of the elements within your operation.
Process thinking was a meaningful advance in the 20th century. It brought improvement to product development, but it’s time to move on to Systems thinking. As you take what ever your washing machine is and redesign it, don’t do it with process thinking, do it with systems thinking. We’re 15% of the way through the 21st century. It’s time you joined the 21st century revolution in systems thinking.
Contact EAC to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive.
For almost 20 years the staff of EAC Product Development Solutions has believed there is a better way to develop products. The “traditional” processes are fundamentally broken and the symptoms of these fractures are a painful reality for many of our customers. Among others, they face missed deadlines, failed product launches, and are unable to effectively manage resources. There’s a better way.
We believe that product development is a continuous system; not a single-track process with a defined start and finish. It extends beyond the engineering department and engages everyone within a company. Because of its breadth, it needs continual support. It begins with the alignment of business objectives and initiatives. Once an entire organization understands the goals for the future they can agree upon a plan for success and focus on putting the right people, processes, and tools in place to meet their goals, drive innovation, and increase productivity.
Each part of the product development system has distinct needs. People in Management, Marketing, Engineering, Manufacturing, Procurement, and Support all have different needs and expectations throughout the product life cycle. We offer a wide variety of tools and services to meet the needs of the entire organization.
– Software tools for design, data management, and publishing
– Training and Education Services
– Implementation and Support Services
– Dynamic Publishing Support and Implementation Services
– Engineering and Design Services
– Process Consulting (Lean Product Development Services)
– Product Development System Assessments
The culture at EAC Product Development Solutions revolves around our customers and clients doing things better. We work very hard to be the best product development solutions provider in the world. We strive to do what’s right during every engagement and maintain transparency with our customers. We work diligently to find areas where our company and our clients can work smarter to become more productive and profitable. Most importantly we understand that we work with people. Human beings that need to live, laugh, and enjoy work.
Know that when someone works with EAC they’re working with the best. The best teams, with the best people, focused on the best processes and technologies. We believe there is a better way to develop products and it starts with EAC Product Development Solutions.
