Building a Better Mousetrap at AME
Durward Sobek, Michael Kennedy and I conducted a workshop on lean product development at last week's Association for Manufacturing Excellence conference.
The workshop uses the Mousetrap® game as a product development challenge: can you build a better mousetrap? Here is the "before" picture (Mousetrap 1.0):
The purpose of this workshop is to help people gain more comfort using rapid learning cycles as part of the product development process. The teams develop Mousetrap 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 in iterative development cycles, use LAMDA to investigate their ideas and A3 reports to document their findings.
The groups are all part of one development team competing for a customer order against a competitor who has set a high bar for performance.
This time, all four teams could only catch 7 mice in five minutes, using three people with the original set up. The "winning" solution, which included ideas from all four teams, caught 23 mice in 5 minutes with only one person, a 10X improvement in mice caught per minute per person.
By sharing the best ideas among the entire group, we end up with at least one solution that will work among the four teams, demonstrating the value of set-based design when the team has a high degree of technical risk and a lot riding on the outcome.
The group used rapid prototyping tools (scissors, masking tape, construction paper) to quickly design and test their ideas in ten minute development cycles, followed by five minute trials.
Special thanks goes to Jamie Flinchbaugh and the Lean Learning Center who originally developed this simulation, and helped me adapt it to product development.
The workshop uses the Mousetrap® game as a product development challenge: can you build a better mousetrap? Here is the "before" picture (Mousetrap 1.0):
The purpose of this workshop is to help people gain more comfort using rapid learning cycles as part of the product development process. The teams develop Mousetrap 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 in iterative development cycles, use LAMDA to investigate their ideas and A3 reports to document their findings.
The groups are all part of one development team competing for a customer order against a competitor who has set a high bar for performance.
This time, all four teams could only catch 7 mice in five minutes, using three people with the original set up. The "winning" solution, which included ideas from all four teams, caught 23 mice in 5 minutes with only one person, a 10X improvement in mice caught per minute per person.
By sharing the best ideas among the entire group, we end up with at least one solution that will work among the four teams, demonstrating the value of set-based design when the team has a high degree of technical risk and a lot riding on the outcome.
The group used rapid prototyping tools (scissors, masking tape, construction paper) to quickly design and test their ideas in ten minute development cycles, followed by five minute trials.
Special thanks goes to Jamie Flinchbaugh and the Lean Learning Center who originally developed this simulation, and helped me adapt it to product development.
Labels: A3 reports, LAMDA, rapid learning cycles
posted by Katherine Radeka
at
7:54 AM
1 Comments:
For those interested in The Mouse Trap Experience, you can find out more here: http://www.leanlearningcenter.com/products/products__mousetrap.cfm
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