Flexible Product Development

In this landmark book, Preston Smith attributes the recent declinein innovation to pressure from financial markets that drivesmanagement toward rigid development approaches such as phaseddevelopment processes, Six Sigma, and project office. Theseprocesses have unintentionally (but effectively) made changesduring development more difficult, disruptive, and expensive, whilethe need for change continues at an accelerating pace. Flexible Product Development is a hands-on resource thatprovides the tools and strategies needed to restore flexibility toany organization and remove the obstacles that stand in the way ofresponsive new product development. Preston Smith introducesapproaches that can enhance development process flexibility bycreating and maintaining development options, delaying decisions,and, in general, reducing the cost of change. Step-by-step, heexplains the basics of flexible product development, provides abroad array of flexibility-enhancing tools, and guides the readerin modifying the organization?s values to embrace this new way ofoperating.

Agile development has been a breakthrough for software developers. Unfortunately, it does not apply to non-software products, because it depends on special characteristics of the software medium. This book dissects agile development, discovers its roots, and rebuilds it so that it does apply to non-software products.

Advance praise for Developing Products in Half the Time Second Edition New Rules, New Tools Preston G. Smith * Donald G. Reinertsen "This is an exceptional book! Get a new highlighter before you start. There are so many 'ah ha's' in each chapter you will never make it through with an old one." Don LaCombe, Ford Motor Company, Product Development Process Leadership "An excellent book with a strong treatment of the cycle-time consequences of overloading your development capacity. It provides powerful and practical concepts for dealing with this issue." Andrew Aquart, Director Product Development, Cordis, a Johnson & Johnson Company "This is practical, useful stuff for people competing in highly competitive fast moving business." Dr. Paul Borrill, Chief Scientist, Sun Microsystems "3M has absorbed many of the tools from the original edition, and this new one will be even more useful. The topic of incremental innovation is crucial to us, and I really appreciate its balanced treatment." Ronald H. Kubinski, Manager New Product Commercialization Services, 3M Company "As the authors correctly point out, the Fuzzy Front End is the least expensive place to reduce cycle time. This book is one of the only sources of concepts, methods, and metrics for compressing this critical portion of the development process." David M. Lewis, Product Manager, Eastman Kodak Co. "Using these tools we've more than cut our time to market in half. The new edition of this classic crystallizes the synergy of the fast-to-market techniques, and the icons in the margins highlight the opportunities and pitfalls." Mike Brennan , Vice President of Product Development, Black & Decker

Flexible, Reliable Software: Using Patterns and Agile Development guides students through the software development process. By describing practical stories, explaining the design and programming process in detail, and using projects as a learning context, the text helps readers understand why a given technique is required and why techniques must be combined to overcome the challenges facing software developers. The presentation is pedagogically organized as a realistic development story in which customer requests require introducing new techniques to combat ever-increasing software complexity. After an overview and introduction of basic terminology, the book presents the core practices, concepts, tools, and analytic skills for designing flexible and reliable software, including test-driven development, refactoring, design patterns, test doubles, and responsibility driven and compositional design. It then provides a collection of design patterns leading to a thorough discussion of frameworks, exemplified by a graphical user interface frramework (MiniDraw). The author also discusses the important topics of configuration management and systematic testing. In the last chapter, projects lead students to design and implement their own frameworks, resulting in a reliable and usable implementation of a large and complex software system complete with a graphical user interface. This text teaches how to design, program, and maintain flexible and reliable software. Installation guides, source code for the examples, exercises, and projects can be found on the author’s website.

This handy resource defines an effective set of design patterns and rules you should know when applying the widely used ISA-88 industry standards to batch manufacturing (called the S88 design pattern) and continuous and discrete manufacturing (called the NS88 design pattern for non-stop production). This book clearly identifies what elements are defined in the batch series and what elements make up the S88 and NS88 design patterns for flexible manufacturing. The book defines design patterns for control system programming, providing patterns for the organization of programmable logic controller (PLC), digital control system (DCS), and other control system application codes. Whether you are in a batch, continuous, or discrete manufacturing environment, these design patterns can be applied to a wide range of production systems, making systems easier to design and implement.

Listed as one of the 30 Best Business Books of 2002 by Executive Book Summaries. Proactive Risk Management's unique approach provides a model of risk that is scalable to any size project or program and easily deployable into any product development or project management life cycle. It offers methods for identifying drivers (causes) of risks so you can manage root causes rather than the symptoms of risks. Providing you with an appropriate quantification of the key factors of a risk allows you to prioritize those risks without introducing errors that render the numbers meaningless. This book stands apart from much of the literature on project risk management in its practical, easy-to-use, fact-based approach to managing all of the risks associated with a project. The depth of actual how-to information and techniques provided here is not available anywhere else.

This title uses a holistic approach to examine the diverse issues that managers face to channel resources in the right direction for commercial success. It details the commercialization of innovation and new products in fast-paced, high-tech markets and how to match tecnological advances to new market opportunities.

Design Methodology for Future Products – Data Driven, Agile and Flexible provides an overview of the recent research in the field of design methodology from the point of view of the members of the scientific society for product development (WiGeP - Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Produktenwicklung e.V.). This book aims to contribute to design methods and their implementation for innovative future products. The main focus is the crucial data-driven, agile, and flexible way of working. Four topics are covered in corresponding chapters, Methods for Product Development and Management, Methods for Specific Products and Systems, Facing the Challenges in Product Development and Model-Based Engineering in Product Development. This publication starts with the agile strategic foresight of sustainable mechatronic and cyber-physical systems, moves on to the topics of system generation engineering in development processes, followed by the technical inheritance in data-driven product development. Product improvements are shown via agile experiential learning based on reverse engineering and via combination of usability and emotions. Furthermore, the development of future-oriented products in the field of biomechatronic systems, sustainable mobility systems and in situ sensor integration is shown. The overcoming of challenges in product development is demonstrated through context-adapted methods by focusing on efficiency and effectiveness, as well as designer-centered methods to tackle cognitive bias. Flow design for target-oriented availability of data and information in product development is addressed. Topics of model-based systems engineering are applied to the function-driven product development by linking model elements at all stages and phases of the product. The potential of model-based systems engineering for modular product families and engineering of multidisciplinary complex systems is shown.

This book addresses many new topical areas for the development of 6 Sigma performance. The text is structured to demonstrate how 6 Sigma methods can be used as a very powerful tool within System Engineering and integration evaluations to help enable the process of Critical Parameter Management. The case studies and examples used throughout the book come from recent successful applications of the material developed in the text.

Liquid or fluid layouts change width based on the user's unique device viewing size. These types of layouts have always been possible with tables but offer new design challenges as well as opportunities when built with CSS. This book, for experienced Web designers with some CSS experience, outlines how to do this successfully. Designers will learn the benefits of flexible layouts and when to choose a liquid, elastic, or hybrid design. They will learn not only how to build a liquid layout from scratch using standards-compliant and cross-browser compatible (X)HTML and CSS, but will also learn how to design and slice their graphic comps in a way that makes flexible design achievable. This book will show designers that flexible layouts do not have to be visually boring or difficult to build when planned and built correctly. Even those who do not intend to build liquid layouts can use the concepts and techniques taught in this book to improve their fixed-width CSS designs, because they will learn how to design for the inherent flexibility of the web medium, instead of the rigid qualities of print media or table grid-based layouts.