In previous videos we talked about a framework we’ve developed for looking at product development as a system. In the last two videos and posts we talked about two of the subsystems, both of them flow systems, one being information flow and one being workflow. The third subsystem of the Product Development Operating System is the system of Continuous Improvement. This subsystem is often missing when we begin to work with an organization, and in organizations that are “committed” to continuous improvement; in many cases the efforts are ad-hoc and underwhelming
If you’re familiar with the works of Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you are probably familiar with his thesis about the tension between our urgent work and important work, and how our urgent work tends to overwhelm our important work. We see this in product development where we see continuous improvement as the important work. Often times it gets pushed aside and overwhelmed by the urgent work of completing projects.
Patrick Lencioni, an author whose work I enjoy reading, talks about the metrics of organizations. He talks about the ultimate metric of an organization as being the health of the organization. In our Product Development Operating System we see the health of your product development system as the ultimate metric of your productivity and effectiveness. It brings to mind the aphorism from Chinese medicine that says, “There is only one disease; congestion. There is only one cure; circulation.” The circulation in product development is the flow systems. The Continuous Improvement subsystem is the system for increasing the overall health of those flows, of the system, and the effectiveness and productivity of the product development system.
The Continuous Improvement subsystem of the product development system has three constituent parts. Each one aligns with a different tier of the organization. There is Strategy. This aligns with the executive tier. The executive tier looks to build a shared vision; a vision of the future of the organization that, collectively, we’re all working to realize. Another element of the continuous improvement subsystem centers on subject mater experts and the increasing their expertise, their development, and the deepening of their expertise and the expansion of competency within the organization. The third element in the continuous improvement subsystem is the importation and development of a root cause problem-solving methodology, specifically one that is appropriate for knowledge workers — the workers that populate product development.
If you bring improvement energies to your product development system, you need to bring a certain threshold of energy just to maintain your current state. If you will, to counter balance the destructive work of entropy. To make significant and continuous improvement you need to invest more energy into the subsystem. You need to invest significant energies into a continuous improvement subsystem that will eventually lead to increased productivity and increased effectiveness of your overall 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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
At EAC, we’ve developed a framework that looks at product development as a system. We call this framework the Product Development Operating System — the PDOS. (Shown above.) To understand how the PDOS framework functions, you must first understand the elements of a competitive system.
The first element of a competitive system is information. Competitive systems have both generalized and specific information. Generalized information covers the full suite of potential strategies and tactics — a playbook. Specialized information is general information that is selected to appropriately address the specific competition — the game plan.
The second element in a competitive system is preparation. Like any sport, practice tends to be a primary contributing factor in who wins the game. In the system sense, behaviors used in competition are rehearsed to develop deeper skills. As learning occurs during practice, ideas, strategies, and tactics are then added to the playbook.
Naturally, the competition itself is the final piece in a competitive system. All skills and knowledge developed through the first two parts of the system are then applied during the competition.
Looking at the framework, you notice that the three components of a competitive system comprise the rows of the PDOS framework. The columns represent the three tiers of the organization. Each tier of the organization has responsibilities that impact the systematic operation of Product Development.
The PDOS thrives on the flow of information. Knowledge is the value medium of product development and information is what flows through the system. A knowledge base that includes Product Development specific information technology tools like PLM systems, design tools, and simulation tools serves as the foundation supporting the other layers of the PDOS.
The preparation layer is where the “important” work happens. This is a sanctuary for continuous improvement. This layer is a core part of the Japanese system. In Stephen Covey’s book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he talks about the division of the urgent work and the important work. He notes avoid letting the urgent work overwhelm the important work because, if that happens, the important work never gets done.
The preparation layer is what is missing from the western approach to product development. We have made an orphan out of feedback, which is the learning element that is critical to continuous improvement.
In Product Development, the competition layer represents the “urgent” part of our charter, the execution of product development or projects. Process thinking organizations see the upper right hand box as “Product Development”. Organizations that shift to a Systems Thinking perspective of Product Development put themselves in a stronger competitive position.