How to Avoid a Slow Motion Train Wreck

Yesterday, one of the sponsors of the PDMA event (who shall go unnamed) sponsored a nice dinner for the attendees, and then provided the night's entertainment. By the time the entertainers went on, it was about 7:30 p.m. after a long day of slideshow-driven presentations. Many of the attendees (including myself) had already had at least two drinks. We were definitely in the mood to be entertained.

The sales team put together a series of amusing sketches showing various sorts of dysfunctional behavior in product development, like keeping team knowledge locked inside the senior engineers' heads, and virtual team members who try to work in the dark. These sketches produced lots of laughs and groans of recognition.

Unfortunately, the sketches were surrounded by a lot of obvious sales pitch. The ratio of time was about 3 parts sales pitch to one part fun. The audience responded by talking over the presentation or walking out. I left myself after about 2/3 of the presentation. I doubt many left with a good impression.

I felt a lot of sympathy for the guy running the show. He was probably blinded by the lights and his location would have made it difficult for him to hear the audience's reaction. He may also not have felt empowered to say, "OK. This isn't working. We need to do a redirect here."

What are the unintentional lessons this sponsor delivered on product development at the PDMA conference?

• Don't allow your enthusiasm for an idea to override your customer and market knowledge. Conference dinners are for rekindling old friendships and building new ones. We expect a sponsor to do a little pitching, but by 7 p.m., we've already seen enough slides.


• Establish early customer feedback mechanisms. One quick run-through with an attendee would have shown that this presentation would be perceived as irritating rather than valuable. During the talk itself, the presenter had moments when he could have received feedback from someone watching the audience reaction from backstage.


• Manage risk with contingency plans. Given the setting, poor audience reaction was a major risk. If the presenter had a Plan B, he would have known what to do.


• If things are obviously not working as planned, don't keep charging ahead with your plans! Even without a Plan B, the presenter could have just had a quick word with the skit people during the 2nd or 3rd video, and created a better plan in the moment. I would have given him a lot of credit for adapting on the fly

Google manages this risk with their incremental development process. How do you manage the risk of poor customer reaction in your own product development process?

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.

Announcing: The 2008 LPPD Exchange

Plans for the Lean PD conference have come a long way in the last few weeks! But I could use some help from you.

As of today, we have our name:

2008 Lean Product and Process Development Exchange

Now we just need a location.

I have a special request for my readers: please let me know either in email or by posting a comment, what you think about locations. What do you think about:

Orlando
Chicago
Dallas
Minneapolis
Denver
Las Vegas
Salt Lake City

Any other ideas? Where would you most like to go in February?

This conference will pull together the thought leaders and trailblazers in Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD) for knowledge-sharing, networking, education and discussion. The Lean Enterprise Institute is our first co-sponsor, and Durward Sobek, Jamie Flinchbaugh, Michael Kennedy and I are on the early list of thought leaders. We've also started to assemble an exciting list of trailblazers who have increased ROI for NPD, slashed time to market, and delivered more customer value with LPPD. It will be the best event to date focused on using lean ideas in the product development space.

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!

Oregon PDMA/PMF Conference Part 3: Space is Always Open

In the afternoon, the conference had an Open Space session where the attendees "design their own conference." Diana Larsen of Futureworks Consulting got us going with a description of the process and the ground rules, while we sat in one giant circle.

People nominated themselves to be session hosts, simply by writing a topic on a piece of paper, choosing one of two times and a location then posting it on the "Marketplace" bulletin board. Then we chose the topics we most wanted to discuss. "Butterflies" chose to work by themselves rather than join groups, but Diana claimed that butterflies would tend to cluster and I did see that happen. "Bumblebees" buzzed from session to session, pollinating one session with ideas from another.

For the first time, I participated in a lively discussion on "Cultural Change for Collaboration" where we talked about the importance of getting senior leaders to behave collaboratively themselves to foster collaboration in the rest of the organization. To do that, we need to make sure that people understand the relationships between collaboration and decision-making, which can take many forms.

I was a bit of a bumblebee in the second session, drifting between topics like Cultural Issues in Global Collaboration, How to Get Anti-social Engineers to Collaborate, and Collaborating with the "Man on the Mountain." This final topic was an interesting lesson in collaboration, because the people drawn to it talked for at least twenty minutes before I observed that we all had a different picture of the "Man on the Mountain" - who he was and why he was up there.

I"ve organized conferences and I'm a bit of a control freak so I wasn't sure how Open Space would work. But the topics were interesting, the session hosts and participants brought their passion into the room and the discussions were interesting and fruitful - much more so than an endless series of passive slideshows.

Oregon PDMA/PMF Conference Part 2: You Think You Have Customers?

In the morning, I attended a break-out session on Collaboration in Innovation by Bryan Jobes of Boeing's Commercial Airplanes Division. He was a senior manager for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Here's the thing that struck me: commercial aircraft designers have to balance trade-offs for a range of customers and end users from passengers, pilots, flight attendants, ground crew, airport infrastructure managers, passenger experience managers (or whatever they call those people who decide that those in Coach don't need much legroom), capacity managers, bean counters, etc. plus a worldwide network of regulatory agencies. That they can do this and deliver an innovative aircraft in a reasonable (for the industry) timeframe seems like quite an accomplishment.

Collaboration is a given in this environment, and he provided a nice example of how Marketing, Product and Technology roadmaps work together to provide direction for a team making literally thousands of trade-off decisions.

Oregon PDMA/PMF Conference Part 1: Best Slideshow Ever

I'm at the Oregon Product Development Management Association and Program Management Forum joint conference today.

The keynote speaker was Sam Lawrence of Jive Software, speaking on Collaboration 2.0. He had a great but not very deep message about how today, it's all about Web 2.0 - it's all about collaboration, people, openness, participation. As a keynote presentation, it was perfect - broad in scope and entertaining in tone. While he didn't offer any new insights, he did set up the deep dives in the break-out sessions very well.

I was most impressed with his use of presentation software (PowerPoint® is the most popular but I'm not certain that was the one he used). Most people use these things to present bullet list after bullet list, perhaps punctuated with a complex diagram. He used it completely differently. Most of his slides consisted of one word or phrase with an accompanying image, delivered alongside a rapidfire monologue. The slides provided a bit of an ironic twist to his words sometimes - think Steven Colbert's The Word. Most often, they punctuated his main points like exclamation marks.

I still have the usual problem with slidesets - I cannot remember much of their content. But with this presentation style and the purpose of his talk, that did not matter quite so much.

Report from the IIR Lean Design & Development Conference in Chicago

I thought that I would have a lot to write about the IIR conference in Chicago. I was wrong. It was disappointing to me, and I've been unsure what to say about it. Last year's experience was such a positive one so I had high expectations going in.

A little background: IIR lost their conference coordinator in the middle of conference organizing, and had to fill in with new people. Their marketing campaign got off to a slow start and attendance was low, so they had to consolidate the agenda and ended up cancelling speakers. However, they didn't consult ANYONE in the Lean Product Development community when they decided whom to cancel. In fact, they almost cancelled Durward Sobek (the guy with the most direct insight into Toyota's product development system) until I got wind of it and called them to complain -- loudly.

As a result, 9 of 21 presentations had everything to do with Lean Manufacturing and nothing to do with Lean Product Development - and some of the others had only the most tenuous links to NPD. I had hoped that the high numbers of practitioner presentations would make it a stronger conference - but they cancelled the speakers who would have been able to contribute that perspective.

On the bright side: there were three presentations worth the price of admission. Durward gave a fantastic talk on A3 thinking. I may be a little biased here, but it seems like his message gets clearer and more on-point every time he speaks. Mike Shipulski, Director of Engineering at Hypertherm gave a dynamic talk about his efforts to get his engineers to reduce part counts, taking "go-and-see" to new heights for the engineers involved, and reducing assembly time from ten hours to one hour for one product. Jay Mortenson, former CFO of RexNord shared a clear and succinct introduction to target costing.

Another bright side: Bretford donated the use of some rolling whiteboards so that I was able to show my Visual Planning demonstration. I love how they demonstrated just how flexible a Visual Planning system can be.

Since I consider myself fortunate to get one or two things to take away from a conference like this, it was a worthwhile experience for the attendees (including me) despite the problems.

The best thing to come out of this may be the plans that Tricia Sutton, Durward and I began cooking up for a "Lean Product Development" summit sometime next Spring. This would be the conference that we'd hoped to have. In our vision, the conference would draw from our client lists to deliver carefully-chosen practitioner presentations that reflect real-world experiences implementing the Toyota Product Development System, and workshops centered on the elements of the system, like set-based concurrent engineering, chief engineers, target costing and visual knowledge.