In previous articles we defined an element of lean as a phase and gate structure for new product development.  This assumes a waterfall approach to the project (versus agile product development).

A new product life cycle phase gate structure might entail, for example: “Definition, Concept, Design, Verification, Qualification, Production and End-of-Life”.  (Your organization might decide on different phase names.)

There’s an apparent contradiction in using a waterfall project approach and calling it lean project management, however.  A goal of any lean process is to work toward ‘single piece’ or continuous flow: agile product development is more like ‘single piece flow’ of information, versus waterfall which is more like ‘batch processing’ of information.

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My last article covered a scalable model for lean product development depending on the number of projects and technical objectives.

Let’s start with the foundational elements from this model:

• Facilitate a lean project
• Understand customer needs (requirements validation and/or agile product development)
• Maximize customer (product) value (product value estimation)

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In my previous article we established the lean product development goal statement as:

Develop products that maximize customer value and minimize product cost, in the least amount of time, and at the least amount of product development cost.

We then derived high-level objectives as follows:

• Better understand the customer (maximize customer value)
• Do the right projects (product, project and portfolio value analysis)
• Do projects right (minimize redesigns, waste and rework)
• Level load the organization (minimize bottlenecks and resource constraints)
• Create and re-use artifacts (standardize and sustain best practices)

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