Don Reinertsen is one of the leading thinkers on the subject of product development and I have been a fan of his work since the early 90s.  This book looks at the management of product development from the perspective of just-in-time manufacturing, and I believe was the first to do so.  From the perspective of Knowledge Worker Performance, it provides some valuable thinking.

Firstly there must be an economic model in place that allows decisions to be made on trade-offs between development schedule, resources, functional scope and product cost.  This is important in that it allows individual knowledge workers to make decisions in real-time without constant recourse to management for decisions.

Secondly the book covers in great depth process design decisions related to how work is managed through a series of resources, including knowledge workers.  Reinertsen argues that as a rule of thumb, work should be managed in modules or other small units of work that are moved through the process in the design equivalent of ‘small batches’.  Such an approach is heavily dependent upon the product architecture, overlapping processes and matching projects to the available capacity.  One interesting point is that loading key resources to 100% always creates large queues of work, which as a massive impact on on-time delivery.  The contrast to this is the ‘large batch’ scenario propagated by ‘stage-gate’ type approaches, where work is queued before a stage-gate review, and the next tasks cannot commence until after the review.  All of this work is backed up with material on queuing theory, information theory and systems theory.

Thirdly the book covers the needs for short feedback loops, whether this be in testing or to get customer opinions.  Short feedback accelerates learning and reduces risk.

The book also contains chapters on approaches to organisation, control of risk, technology and metrics.  Reinertsen is careful to point out that there is no such thing as ‘best practice’.  For example, he cites examples where the stage-gate approach, maligned in much of the book, is the correct approach. 

All in all a fantastic introduction to product development processes from a thoughtful and rigorous author and highly recommended.

Dr Ian Gregory, 2009