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.

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

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.

A guide to using the power of design flexibility to improve the performance of complex technological projects, for designers, managers, users, and analysts. Project teams can improve results by recognizing that the future is inevitably uncertain and that by creating flexible designs they can adapt to eventualities. This approach enables them to take advantage of new opportunities and avoid harmful losses. Designers of complex, long-lasting projects—such as communication networks, power plants, or hospitals—must learn to abandon fixed specifications and narrow forecasts. They need to avoid the “flaw of averages,” the conceptual pitfall that traps so many designs in underperformance. Failure to allow for changing circumstances risks leaving significant value untapped. This book is a guide for creating and implementing value-enhancing flexibility in design. It will be an essential resource for all participants in the development and operation of technological systems: designers, managers, financial analysts, investors, regulators, and academics. The book provides a high-level overview of why flexibility in design is needed to deliver significantly increased value. It describes in detail methods to identify, select, and implement useful flexibility. The book is unique in that it explicitly recognizes that future outcomes are uncertain. It thus presents forecasting, analysis, and evaluation tools especially suited to this reality. Appendixes provide expanded explanations of concepts and analytic tools.

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.

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.

In the last decade, the production of mechanical components to be assembled in final products produced in high volumes (e.g. cars, mopeds, industrial vehicles, etc.) has undergone deep changes due to the overall modifications in the way companies compete. Companies must consider competitive factors such as short lead times, tight product tolerances, frequent market changes and cost reduction. Anyway, companies often have to define production objectives as trade-offs among these critical factors since it can be difficult to improve all of them. Even if system flexibility is often considered a fundamental requirement for firms, it is not always a desirable characteristic of a system because it requires relevant investment cost which can jeopardize the profitability of the firm. Dedicated systems are not able to adapt to changes of the product characteristics while flexible systems offer more flexibility than what is needed, thus increasing investment and operative costs. Production contexts characterized by mid to high demand volume of well identified families of products in continuous evolution do not require the highest level of flexibility; therefore, manufacturing system flexibility must be rationalized and it is necessary to find out the best trade-off between productivity and flexibility by designing manufacturing systems endowed with the right level of flexibility required by the production problem. This new class of production systems can be named Focused Flexibility Manufacturing Systems-FFMSs. The flexibility degree in FFMSs is related to their ability to cope with volume, mix and technological changes, and it must take into account both present and future changes. The required level of system flexibility impacts on the architecture of the system and the explicit design of flexibility often leads to hybrid systems, i.e. automated integrated systems in which parts can be processed by both general purpose and dedicated machines. This is a key issue of FFMSs and results from the matching of flexibility and productivity that respectively characterize FMSs and Dedicated Manufacturing Systems (DMSs). The market share of the EU in the machine tool sector is 44%; the introduction of focused flexibility would be particularly important for machine tool builders whose competitive advantage is based on the ability of customizing their systems on the basis of needs of their customers. In fact, even if current production contexts frequently present situations which would fit well with the FFMS approach, tradition and know-how of machine tool builders play a crucial role. Firms often agree with the focused flexibility vision, nevertheless they decide not to pay the risk and efforts related to the design of this new system architecture. This is due also to the lack of well-structured design approaches which can help machine tool builders to configure innovative systems. Therefore, the FFMS topic is studied through the book chapters following a shared mission: "To define methodologies and tools to design production systems with a minimum level of flexibility needed to face, during their lifecycle, the product and process evolution both in the technological and demand aspects. The goal is to find out the optimal trade-off between flexibility and productivity". The book framework follows the architecture which has been developed to address the FFMS Design problem. This architecture is both broad and detailed, since it pays attention to all the relevant levels in a firm hierarchy which are involved in the system design. Moreover, the architecture is innovative because it models both the point of view of the machine tool builder and the point of view of the system user. The architecture starts analyzing Manufacturing Strategy issues and generating the possible demand scenario to be faced. Technological aspects play a key role while solving process plan problems for the products in the part family. Strategic and technological data becomes input when a machine tool builder performs system configuration. The resulting system configurations are possible solutions that a system user considers when planning its system capacity. All the steps of the architecture are deeply studied, developing methods and tools to address each subproblem. Particular attention is paid to the methodologies adopted to face the different subproblems: mathematical programming, stochastic programming, simulation techniques and inverse kinematics have been used. The whole architecture provides a general approach to implement the right degree of flexibility and it allows to study how different aspects and decisions taken in a firm impact on each other. The work presented in the book is innovative because it gives links among different research fields, such as Manufacturing Strategy, Process Plan, System Design, Capacity Planning and Performance Evaluation; moreover, it helps to formalize and rationalize a critical area such as manufacturing system flexibility. The addressed problem is relevant at an academic level but, also, at an industrial level. A great deal of industrial sectors need to address the problem of designing systems with the right degree of flexibility; for instance, automotive, white goods, electrical and electronic goods industries, etc. Attention to industrial issues is confirmed by empirical studies and real case analyses which are presented within the book chapters.

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 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.

Economies around the globe have evolved into being largely service-oriented economies. Consumers no longer just want a printer or a car, they rather ask for a printing service or a mobility service. In addition, service-oriented organizations increasingly exploit new devices, technologies and infrastructures. Agility is the ability to deal with such changing requirements and environments. Agile ways of working embrace change as a positive force and harness it to the organization's competitive advantage. The approach described in this book focuses on the notion of a service as a piece of functionality that offers value to its customers. Instead of solely looking at agility in the context of system or software development, agility is approached in a broader context. The authors illustrate three kinds of agility that can be found in an agile enterprise: business, process and system agility. These three types of agility reinforce each other and establish the foundation for the agile enterprise. Architecture, patterns, models, and all of the best practices in system development contribute to agile service development and building agile applications. This book addresses two audiences. On the one hand, it aims at agile and architecture practitioners who are looking for more agile ways of working in designing and building business services or who are interested in extending and improving their agile methods by using models and model-based architectures. On the other hand, it addresses students of (enterprise) architecture and software development or service science courses, both in computer science and in business administration.