Recently I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop by the legendary Donald Reinertsen called “The Science of Lean Product Development”. The workshop was part of QCon San Francisco 2011.

For a start off, Reinertsen is not your typical evangelical, zealot type presenter you expect on the circuit. He is old school and is a man of science. I like that. Tom him it is abou measuring, analysing and quantifying our decisions and decisions = inventory = waste.

I had been feeling pretty cynical about the entire Lean/Kanban world to be frank. Everything I had been seeing indicated that people were simply flocking to the latest fad without understanding the underlying philosophies. What was really concerning me was the view point that software can somehow be delivered in a step-by-step, relay race type process. I wrote some pretty damming things about this in blog 2/4.

However Reinertsen started out with something that really made me sit up. He has come from the old world – the world of Lean Manufacturing and he started out highlighting how Lean movement is failing because it is trying to apply the LM relay-race approach (suitable to a simple domain such as manufacturing) into a complex, intangible and abstract domain like software. He highlighted how this “lift and shift” of approach from two vastly different domains was fundamentally flawed. Finally – someone who was able to look at this for what it is! I was excited. I sat up straight and gave him by undivided attention.

And it only got better from there. Frankly, Don is the man. He isn’t wed to any particular framework – just the science and mathematics behind why Lean and Agile approaches work. Since his days of expertly guiding executives in Lean Manufacturing while working at McKinsey, Reinertsen has been dedicated to product development and has written some gems of books including Developing Products in Half the Time, Managing the Design Factory and most recently the rather intimidating and heavy the Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development.

First off, he covered off the schools of Lean Product Development, followed by how Lean changed manufacturing but why it needs to be approached differently in software. In his own words he said “Lean Manufacturing is a good starting point but a bad destination”.

We then went into what I felt was the most valuable part of the workshop: Establishing a [Lean] Economic Framework. He re-established a simple context that I feel is so lacking in our industry – we are paid to come to work to deliver things that make or save the company money. We therefore need to consider products in the language of money. Classic quote:

He then went into something critical for Product Owners – the only way to make meaningful trade-offs is if we have a common language and measurement system for financial decisions. For example – if I change Feature X on Product Y does it increase the volume I will sell and the price I sell them for i.e. - is it a preference shifting feature? So often we see product owners make huge assumptions about this without sufficient analysis or modelling or the desired outcomes. Product Ownership is not just about priorities. It is about value. Period.

He then covered the contrasting approaches to managing complexity. Lean uses Queues. Scrum uses Containers (think time boxes). We covered a lot of heavy mathematical formulae on queuing including some integration. Urgh! The key outcome was this: control queues, not cycle time.

We then covered variability which I found fascinating. I have seen Lean & Kanban people present data showing how much better Kanban is because it reduces variability. Rubbish! Reniertsen covered these key four principles:

1. Innovation introduces uncertainty in outcomes
2. We can add variability without adding value, but we cannot add value without adding variability
3. We must design processes that function in the presence of variability
4. We can reduce the cost of variability without reducing the amount of variability.

Hallelujah! I am finally starting to feel more comfortable about Lean!

We then went onto one of the most undervalued subjects in our industry and something Apple has got NAILED - the Cost of Delay. Very few Product Owners I have worked with really understand this concept, which to me highlights a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of the business in which they work. Consider the following:

Do your Products Owners get this? Really?

By the end of the day I felt like someone had skewered by head with a javelin and knowledge was dribbling out the puncture wounds.

So to Don – thank you for an absolutely outstanding workshop. Considering we were looking at value, I left with my bucket of value overflowing.