Report from the IIR Lean Design & Development Conference in Chicago

I thought that I would have a lot to write about the IIR conference in Chicago. I was wrong. It was disappointing to me, and I've been unsure what to say about it. Last year's experience was such a positive one so I had high expectations going in.

A little background: IIR lost their conference coordinator in the middle of conference organizing, and had to fill in with new people. Their marketing campaign got off to a slow start and attendance was low, so they had to consolidate the agenda and ended up cancelling speakers. However, they didn't consult ANYONE in the Lean Product Development community when they decided whom to cancel. In fact, they almost cancelled Durward Sobek (the guy with the most direct insight into Toyota's product development system) until I got wind of it and called them to complain -- loudly.

As a result, 9 of 21 presentations had everything to do with Lean Manufacturing and nothing to do with Lean Product Development - and some of the others had only the most tenuous links to NPD. I had hoped that the high numbers of practitioner presentations would make it a stronger conference - but they cancelled the speakers who would have been able to contribute that perspective.

On the bright side: there were three presentations worth the price of admission. Durward gave a fantastic talk on A3 thinking. I may be a little biased here, but it seems like his message gets clearer and more on-point every time he speaks. Mike Shipulski, Director of Engineering at Hypertherm gave a dynamic talk about his efforts to get his engineers to reduce part counts, taking "go-and-see" to new heights for the engineers involved, and reducing assembly time from ten hours to one hour for one product. Jay Mortenson, former CFO of RexNord shared a clear and succinct introduction to target costing.

Another bright side: Bretford donated the use of some rolling whiteboards so that I was able to show my Visual Planning demonstration. I love how they demonstrated just how flexible a Visual Planning system can be.

Since I consider myself fortunate to get one or two things to take away from a conference like this, it was a worthwhile experience for the attendees (including me) despite the problems.

The best thing to come out of this may be the plans that Tricia Sutton, Durward and I began cooking up for a "Lean Product Development" summit sometime next Spring. This would be the conference that we'd hoped to have. In our vision, the conference would draw from our client lists to deliver carefully-chosen practitioner presentations that reflect real-world experiences implementing the Toyota Product Development System, and workshops centered on the elements of the system, like set-based concurrent engineering, chief engineers, target costing and visual knowledge.