They say that immigrants to the United States are often the biggest patriots and in my case that is certainly true. This year, however, I'm spending Fourth of July at home working hard on a new paper about Product Development Systems.
A Product Development System is the set of resources, assets, and activities used by an organization to develop new products. In the paper I lay out five distinct aspects of a PDS:
- Information Architecture (how we manage specs, checklists, etc.)
- Value Stream Architecture (processes and inventory queues)
- Organization Architecture (how we structure groups, teams, etc., including locations)
- Product Architecture (relationships between products, subsystems, components)
- Social Architecture (the “soft” interactions that build trust and enhance learning)
As organizations grow, they tend to emphasize the process dimension as they seek improved performance. Experience suggests, however, that problems and remedies usually relate to two or more of these aspects. Successful improvement of a PDS, therefore, must diagnose and improve all its aspects, not just processes.
Hopefully the paper will be done and announced in the e-newsletter in the next few days. I will update this posting with a link when it is completed.
Frode L. Odegard is the Founder and CEO of the
Lean Software Institute.
