LPPDE A Hit!

I spent last week at the Lean Product & Process Development Exchange, and it was wonderful! It exceeded my expectations by far. We ended up with around 100 enthusiastic and engaged attendees, give or take a few each day.

Monday was Workshop Day, with four workshops. The most popular was Jim Luckman's Value Stream Mapping for Product Development. That one was a bit crowded but very well-received. The workshop I conducted with Jamie Flinchbaugh, Leadership Skills for Lean Product Developers also had a nice group. This was the first time he and I had done this workshop, and we learned as much as the participants. We had an engaged group with lively discussion that took us where we needed to go. The two half-day workshops also filled up, and received good reviews.

Tuesday and Wednesday were the meat of the conference. The big surprise was the real-time debate between Ellen Domb, a TRIZ expert and Michael Kennedy, the knowledge-based development expert. Michael encourages his clients to understand the trade-offs inherent in product design, while TRIZ encourages developers to transcend trade-offs to find ideal results. The synergies between the two approaches became crystal-clear as the debate proceeded over the two days, and I am looking forward to seeing what the two of them come up with as they put their heads together.

The Open Exchange sessions on Wednesday also exceeded my expectations. We really didn't know what to expect. The participants nominated over thirty topics on Tuesday. Voting and combining narrowed those to eighteen topics for Wednesday afternoon, split between three sessions. Although our intention was to have small groups of ten or less, many topic groups became larger than that, and were resistant to splitting up. Instead, one group took over the hallway to get enough space for everyone, and another merged two circles into one. We had assigned a thought leader or presenter to each group to facilitate, and they did a good job of leading the discussion, whether the groups were a handful or much larger.

The topics included things like SBCE, Metrics, Global Product Development, SW Tools and Knowledge Creation and beyond. I participated in sessions on Synergies between Agile and Lean, Integration Events and SBCE. Many of the participants who planned to leave early were sorry to miss the experience. We will definitely do this again next year.

We also learned that many of the participants wanted more opportunities to learn about the basics of Lean Product Development. We will address that with a tutorial webinar series this fall, and with more targeted workshops next spring.

The week before the conference, the LPPDE Board approved the 2009 Lean Product and Process Development Exchange! We have already begun to look at locations and will announce the final dates by June 30, 2008.

I hope to see you there!

LPPDE: Dates, Location and Thought Leaders

I am so happy to announce the final dates and location for the 2008 Lean Product and Process Development Exchange!

Location: Denver, CO at the Grand Hyatt.

Dates: April 21 (workshops), April 22 - 23 (main conference)

Thought Leader Panel (besides me):

• Durward K. Sobek, professor at Montana State University and editor of Allen Ward's Lean Product and Process Development.


• Michael Kennedy, author of Product Development for the Lean Enterprise and co-founder of Targeted Convergence, Inc. We will (if all goes well) have a launch party for Michael's 2nd book during the conference!


• Mary Poppendieck, author of Lean Software Development.


• Jamie Flinchbaugh, co-author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Lean and co-founder of the Lean Learning Center.


• Tricia Sutton, founder of LeanEx, a lean product development peer learning group in Chicago, IL and president of Sutton Enterprises, Inc.


• Ellen Domb, co-author of Simplified TRIZ and Beyond Strategic Vision, and founder of the PQR Group.


• Bo Oppenheim, professor at Loyola Marymount University and member of the Lean Aerospace Initiative.


• Jim Luckman, Lean Enterprise Institute instructor and consultant.

I have also begun to recruit an exciting set of success stories from lean product development pioneers. As I get confirmations, I will post updates on the site.

Our target date for opening registration is October 29, 2007 to coincide with the AME Annual Conference in Chicago that week. Our target base price is $1490 per attendee. With early registration, partner and team discounts, the lowest available target price is $940 per attendee. We will also offer an academic rate for full time students and professors in product development-related fields.

We will launch the official website the same day we launch registration.

I hope to see you in Denver!

LPPDE Update

I may have been taking some time off, but the LPPDE Organizing Team has been very busy! This week, we travel to our two finalist cities, Denver and Chicago, to nail down our site and date selections. We have also narrowed the window of time to April of 2008.

We intend to have our registration system available in October. In the meantime, we have set a target of $1500 for our registration fee, for two full days of presentations, with an additional fee for pre-conference workshops.

We have also signed up an outstanding list of thought leaders to help guide the agenda and recruit speakers. Michael Kennedy, Jamie Flinchbaugh of the Lean Learning Center, Bo Oppenheim of the Lean Aerospace Initiative and Jim Luckman join Durward Sobek, Tricia Sutton and myself on the thought leader panel.

We are looking for lean product development practitioners with great stories to tell, and additional sponsors! If you would like to be considered, please use my contact form to send me an email or give me a call.

2008 Lean Product & Process Development Conference a Go!!

Today, the Lean Enterprise Institute agreed to sponsor our Lean Product and Process Development conference in 2008! This was the final piece needed before we could make a "go" decision.

This conference will reflect Dr. Allen Ward's vision for Lean Product Development, as represented best in the Lean Product and Process Development book that just came out this year. Our intention is to have a two day conference filled with practitioner presentations, plus a set of pre-conference workshops from some of our thought leaders. You can get a lot of the theory out of books or from websites like mine. But where else will you be able to hear from some of the pioneering companies out there that have been using this stuff to get results like faster time-to-market, lower product costs, more new products and more profits from new product development?

I will co-chair the conference with Tricia Sutton of Sutton Enterprises. We've also been in contact with a terrific roster of speakers including Rich Gildersleeve of djOrtho, who won PDMA's Innovator of the Year award in 2005 for their lean product development efforts. Durward Sobek has of course already provided some unofficial guidance.

We will base the conference on the same model as the Lean Accounting Summit, with a panel of thought leaders guiding us as we finalize the agenda. But first we need to nail down location and dates (and take care of some administrivia to set up an infrastructure).

Watch this space for more news as things evolve!