Book Description
The man who launched a revolution in product development with his bestselling Developing Products in Half the Time is back with a new book that's also certain to be a classic. In Managing the Design Factory Donald G. Reinertsen presents concepts and practical tools that will be invaluable for anyone trying to get products out of the pipeline and into the market.
The first book to put the principles of World Class Manufacturing to work in the development process, Managing the Design Factory combines the powerful analytical tools of queuing, information, and system theories with the proven ideas of organization design and risk management. The result: a methodical approach to consistently hit the "sweet spot" of quality, cost, and time in developing any product. Reinertsen illustrates these concepts with concrete examples drawn from his work with many leading companies across different industries.
Fresh and thought-provoking, the book challenges many of the conventional approaches to product development. "There are no best practices," Reinertsen writes, "the idea of best practices is a seductive but dangerous trap." Unlike other books that promote rules and rituals based on benchmarking "best practices," this book focuses on practical tools that account for varied situations. He breaks new ground with a disciplined, quantitative approach for making decisions on critical issues: When should we use a sequential or concurrent process? Centralized or decentralized control? Functional or team organizations?
Full of practical techniques, concrete examples, and solid general principles, this is a real toolkit for product developers. Moreover, it is written with the clarity, precision, and humor that are Reinertsen's trademarks. He promises to challenge the thinking of anyone involved in product development.
Customer Reviews:
An excellent guide to product development.......2007-08-27
"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.
Best book on product development and agility around.......2004-07-02
I don't think they use the word agility once, but this book clearly enunciates all of the reasons that agile processes often show success, without prescribing a specific set of items to do. This book will enable managers of development teams to look at the product they're building, its impact on the business's bottom line, and make both long-term and daily decisions about how to run their team. Individual developers will also gain an understanding of how to better streamline processes -- for instance, people often think that introducing large processes to "prevent an error from happening again" is a good idea. However, this book will help you to learn why that can be bad; that it can introduce queues and actually result in a process slowdown, especially if it happens early in the development process and on the critical path.
I just can't say enough about this book; some other specific books on Agile software development are helpful to give you ideas of specific things to do, but this book is absolutely crucial to learn and use in your daily decision-making process.
World-class information for product development managers.......2003-05-06
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,
...
Real thinking and action tools you can use.......2002-02-25
If you're looking for a book to arm you with the latest buzzwords and easy answers, this is not for you. If you're looking for a useful framework for thinking about product design and tools for applying principles, this is an excellent buy. This book is clearly written, well-organized, and full of useful information.
Unlike many management books, it's not 20 pages of information stretched out to 200 pages in order to make a book. Also, unlike most product development books, this book is of great value not just to product managers and designers, but would be a great read for financial managers and marketing managers. A manufacturing manager reading this book will smile with satisfaction at seeing common modern manufacturing principles well applied to the design realm.
The only weak points I can think of are: 1) That it may be useful for the author to break out case studies rather than keeping them in the same typeface intermingled with the rest of the text. 2) No real advice is given on how to overcome real-world resistance to these ideas. Some sage advice on how to introduce these concepts and tools into organizations with existing biases and cultures could be a real benefit to practitioners. These are minor objections though.
Whether you're in a software start-up or part of a Fortune 500 company design team doing existing product improvement, this book contains useful information that will enhance your understanding of what you're doing right and what you could do better - and WHY!
every design engineer should read this book........2001-05-06
Managing the Design Factory; A Product Developer's Toolbox, by Donald G. Reinertsen, is an important book on how successful companies should develop new products. Many popular management books share some common themes such as; JIT, kanban, lean manufacturing, reducing WIP, quick turn times, low inventory. Unfortunately, the development process in most companies has been slow to apply these insights to their engineering and design practice. Reinertsen does a superb job of showing how this is done. The Design Factory exists for one purpose - the same as the manufacturing factory - to make a profit. The focus of the book is on tools, not rules and rituals. These are practical tools that account for varied situations. The information is presented in a form that an engineer can understand and appreciate, but without unnecessary difficulty. There are excellent sections on queue and information theory, and capacity utilization and batch size, and on eliminating useless controls. I agree completely with the `do it, try it, fix it' approach to development, and not being burdened with trying to make it right the first time. Every practicing design engineer should read this book.
Average customer rating:
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Managing New Technology Development
William E. Souder , and
J. Daniel Sherman
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill Professional
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0070597480 |
Book Description
New technology development starts with the generation of an idea. It ends with that idea's commercial applications: a new product or a new service in between is a complex sequence of stages demanding specialized management methods. With this in-depth survey, R&D, marketing, and engineering managers can learn from the foremost experts about the most successful, proven practices and techniques--for managing all the stages of new technology development. Each chapter focuses on the activities of a separate stage, using real-world industrial examples to illustrate applications of the product champion, parallel development methods, human factors in compressing cycle times, and other concepts.
Average customer rating:
- The Right Blend of Rigor and Inspiration
|
From Followers to Leaders: Managing Innovation in Newly Industrializing Countries
Naushad Forbes
Manufacturer: Routledge
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0415251761 |
Book Description
This book centres on the ways in which ordinary firms can improve technology management. It provides a welcome alternative to the existing literature that focuses almost exclusively on leading edge firms such as IBM or Microsoft.
The authors argue that succeeding as a follower-firm requires learning from many experiences and avoiding simplistic 'how-to' approaches that prescribe one best practice. They assert that there are many 'leading edges' and that they appear in the most unlikely places. The book contains major case studies of firms from industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals, software, garments, beer and steel, drawn from twelve different countries.
From a follower perspective, individual chapters cover:
*the role of innovation on the shop-floor
*the importance of mixing process and product innovation
*the challenges involved in building an innovation culture
*the special role of research and development, and of design.
These topics ensure a deeper understanding of strategy in follower-firms, simultaneously providing insight for public policy in building local technological capacity.
Customer Reviews:
The Right Blend of Rigor and Inspiration.......2004-06-07
Forbes and Wield have crafted an excellent survey of the nexus between innovation and international development. This pathbreaking work is a dependable source for both scholars and interested laypeople seeking to understand how innovation within firms truly happens.
Average customer rating:
- Excellent description of important computer architecture
|
Distributed Applications Engineering: Building New Applications and Managing Legacy Applications With Distributed Technologies (Practitioner Series (Springer-Verlag))
Inji Wijegunaratne , and
George Fernandez
Manufacturer: Springer-Verlag Telos
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ASIN: 3540762108 |
Book Description
Client/server and distributed technologies have made great strides since their emergence in the late 1980s to become very popular in the IT industry today. This book illustrates techniques not only for designing GUI client/server applications, but also for managing complex application environments containing both legacy and new applications. Topics covered in this book include - The what, when and how of the three tier client/server model - Coupling and dependency: key design factors in distributed systems - Distributed application design alternatives for the enterprise - The Federated application structure for integrating the applications of the enterprise - A real-life case study of a major financial institution - Systems Architects and senior technical staff Project Managers and Software Engineers involved with or interested in client/server computing, and final year undergraduate and postgraduate students will find this book useful.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent description of important computer architecture.......1999-08-30
Client/server and distributed computing is of critical importance to any organisations effective us of Information Technology. This importance has only been heightened by the explosive growth of the Internet. This book very clearly introduces the main concepts and issues with distributed computing and it then presents an architectural approach for addressing those issues. The architecture presented covers both new and legacy systems and also the range of distribution approaches from request/reply, through messaging to object-oriented. The major conclusion of the book is the importance of federated architectures and the issues and opportunities available through implementing such an approach. As someone who has worked in this area for many years I found the book very useful, informative, and immediately applicable to current problems I am working on. The material is well illustrated with many practical examples and realistic case studies, including a chapter describing a similar approach independently implemented by a large bank. The book also includes an appendix listing major vendors and products that are relevant to distributed computing architectures. For any organisations looking to implement, exploit, or extend their distributed computing systems this book is a very important study of the area and offers a real-life solution for many of the issues. For anyone just wanting to learn about distributed computing I would also recommend this book to them.
Average customer rating:
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Managing New Product Technology (Ama Management Briefing)
Robert Szakonyi
Manufacturer: Amacom Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0814423388 |
Book Description
Brings together works by scholars in organization theory and experts in the implementation of manufacturing innovation to examine how American industry can overcome individual and organizational obstacles to technological innovation. Uses the results of empirical studies, case histories, and extensive interviews with managers in a wide range of industries to identify the issues managers face when adopting such technologies as computer-aided design and robotics.
Average customer rating:
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A New Approach to Managing Fisheries.: An article from: Issues in Science and Technology
Robert Repetto
Manufacturer: National Academy of Sciences
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ASIN: B0008IEHQ2
Release Date: 2005-07-28 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Issues in Science and Technology, published by National Academy of Sciences on September 22, 2001. The length of the article is 5417 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: A New Approach to Managing Fisheries.
Author: Robert Repetto
Publication:
Issues in Science and Technology (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 2001
Publisher: National Academy of Sciences
Volume: 18
Issue: 1
Page: 77
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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Partnering to succeed: Keys to managing technology development, risk and globalization : presented at the 2001 ASME Mechanical Engineering Congress and ... 11-16, 2001, New York, New York (TS)
Manufacturer: American Society of Mechanical Engineers
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Binding: Unknown Binding
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China's National Income, 1952-1995
Manufacturer: Westview Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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China: Weathering the Storm and Learning the Lessons (Document of the World Bank)
World Bank
Manufacturer: World Bank
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ASIN: 0821344862 |
Book Description
This report contains business intelligence information for succesful export-import, business and investment operations, strategic contacts and more... The report also contains selected information on investment and business opportunities, international economic projects, tenders, government projects, as well as, marketing and export-import opportunities information.
Books:
- Marketing and Consumer Identity in Multicultural America
- Marketing Research: An Applied Orientation with SPSS, Fourth Edition
- Marketing Research Project Manual
- Marketing Research: The Impact of the Internet
- Measuring Customer Satisfaction: Development and Use of Questionnaires
- Microsoft Help Desk for Microsoft Office 2000 (Eu-Help Desk)
- Multicultural Customer Service
- Multimedia Fingerprinting Forensics for Traitor Tracing (EURASIP Book Series on Signal Processing and Communications) (Eurasip Signal Processing and Communications)
- New Product Development: A Practical Workbook for Improving Performance
- New Product Launch: 10 Proven Strategies
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