Managing the Design Factory

"Managing the design factory" provides an excellent set of practices which can improve your product development and optimize your product development on the dimension you want it to. It provided me with key insights and fresh ideas on how to think about product development.The book consists of four parts. The first part is a general introduction to product development and clarifies some assumptions made in the rest of the book. The second part is a set of thinking tools for product development. The third part provides concrete practices, called action tools. The last part summerizes the rest of the book and suggests actions to take.The thinking tools in the second part are key-insights in product development. The first thinking tool is to try to think of product development economically. This also provides four ways to optimize your product development: lowest expense, lowest unit cost, highest performance and shortest time. In the rest of the book Reinertsen uses these four optimizations to show how each action tool will need to be used differently. The second thinking tool is queueing theory. It provides a view of product development as a series of queues. Managing the product development queues becomes essential. The third thinking tool is information theory. What is the value of information and how to optimize for the value. The last thinking tool is systems theory. Think of whole product development as systems, look for feedback loops and look for assumptions behind your current thinking. The thinking tools were the most interesting part of the book (in my opinion) and I thoroughly enjoyed any of these chapters.The actions tools in part three provide concrete things to do in your product development. This part will use the thinking tools provided in part two to explain the action and also explain how they are different in the different optimizations. The tools were clear and useful. The only criticism could be that there is some duplication between "Developing products in half the time", but that was expected. Also, the tools are just introduced in one chapter and most of them could have filled a book on its own.Conclusion. "Managing the design factory" is an excellent book on product development and provides key-insights and tools for looking at product development. I would recommend it for anyone who is involved in product development.

Over years of working to improve the process of new product development in organizations with which I have been associated, I have read many books on new product development and reducing cycle time of new product development. I regularly am also asked about these topics in college and executive courses I teach. There is no single book that completely covers these topics. However, if you only have time to read one book, I think Reinertsen's book is the one to start with. It is a real eye opener. Many profound(!) and extraordinarily productive concepts and methods are presented in a reasonably sized, easy to understand volume. You won't go wrong in buying it.

I have never seen so much good advice about product development in one place. Applying concepts from manufacturing, finance, queuing theory and communications theory, Reinertsen proposes many ways in which we can design better processes for development.For example, if we were to view the investment in design work as a depreciating asset, like work-in-process inventory in the factory, we would be able to make better decisions about time, manpower, and project delay tradeoffs.Key concepts include: valuing design work based on its financial impact on the organization; learning as much as possible as early as possible in the development cycle; managing queues in the development process; creating specifications which are flexible for as long as possible, so that evolving customer requirements can be accommodated.He clearly shows that we can optimize development work on only one of the following parameters: Product cost, product performance, speed of development, development expense. The approach for each one is different, and it is important to be clear which one is primary.There is a wealth of useful and practical advice in this book. For example, here are some comments on testing: "Too often testing is viewed as a necessary evil in the development process. It only exists because we make mistakes. If we made fewer mistakes, we would not need to do all this testing. We should spend our money on `designing in quality' instead of finding defects by testing. The result of such an attitude may be a test department that is under-resourced and under-managed. Unfortunately, by viewing testing as a problem, rather than an asset, we miss the opportunity to capitalize on the extraordinary improvements that can take place in product testing."Let us start by putting testing in perspective. The elapsed schedule time for product testing is typically 30 to 60 percent of overall development cycle length. This is not another minor activity, it is a major design activity. ... text results have inherently high information content. In fact, testing is usually the stage of design process that generates the greatest amount of information.... ...Most companies misunderstand the role of testing ... because they fail to distinguish between design testing and manufacturing testing. ... Manufacturing testing is done to identify defects in the manufacturing process. ... Design testing is done to generate information about the design. A good outcome is high information generation early in the design process. ... We want a failure rate close to 50 percent...." [pp 230-232]I highly recommend this book to senior managers in product development, and their Marketing and Finance counterparts.Reviewed by John Levy,...

Every once in a while you come across a book that cuts through all the verbiage and lays out the simple, solid fundamentals of a domain. This is one such book. The style is really concise and to the point. This book has helped me better understand some of the principles behind commonly used practices.For example, the chapter on queuing theory is very concise but also crystal clear, and has helped me look at Kanban under a sharper light. The chapter on the value of information and how it relates to risk taking was also an eye opener. There are many such gems here, even though the book is relatively short. Every page counts.I think it's a wonderful book for project managers and anyone who has a desire to equip themselves with some fundamentals on which to make better decisions in the complex process of product design. The book aims to help you think clearer and gives you some navigational aids to steer your teams and organisations to a successful outcome.

The author writes very clear and has structured the book well. Anecdotes throughout keep the book lively while at the same time sticking to a clear model for improving product design.After the introductory part, Part II sets out the tools: economic models, which will later be used for decision making, followed by queues that replace cycles, information and finally feedback loops. Part III comprises chapters that each provide more pragmatic advice on organisation, process, product architecture, product specifications, control systems, and management of uncertainty and risk.One minor fault lies in the author bringing in too many ideas that are not really followed through, such as chaos theory and some aspects of queueing theory.All in all a good read for those interested in improving product design without the buzzwords, especially suitable for those with a technical background.

Good simple efficient transaction. Thanks. Good saving on buyng here and worth buying from this vendor. Good book as a reference. Some techniques have been around a long time but nice to see in 1 place, especially if you are new to design as I am, from my history, primarily in manufacture

This is a great book - anyone in agile/lean product development should read this book. Many 'meta level' ideas included in the book it maybe a while since its has been written but the wisdom is timeless

Livre très intéressant pour prendre du recul sur les processus de développement de produits.

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