Re-Reading Allen Ward

On a long plane flight yesterday, I spent some time re-reading Allen Ward's Lean Product and Process Development. I had first read the book in a blitz right after I got my hot little hands on a copy at the 2007 Lean Transformation Summit. It's been a reference book for me since.

This re-reading was prompted by my attempt to introduce some of this material into the introductory talk that I do about lean product development. That didn't go over so well. There are so many new concepts embedded in that book: the entrepreneurial system designer, trade-off curves, set-based concurrent engineering, development cadence, etc - that 45 minutes of speaking time isn't enough to scratch the surface of the material. There is a lot of dense information in that book, but it may be difficult for someone new to the field to figure out how to get a toehold on this new world of product development that Dr. Ward envisioned.

The answer to "This is great - now what?" is found in the foreward at the beginning of the book by John Shook and Durward Sobek, where they describe the LAMDA cycle of learning. The act of simply Looking at your product development process - not the forms and slidesets, but at the stuff you actually produce - is a good first step, followed naturally by Asking why? Why do we repeat the same mistakes? Why do we have design loopbacks late in development? Why was one product a hit and the next one a fizzle?

LAMDA didn't make it into this version of the book, which he wrote three years before his death - he hints at it, but the idea isn't yet fully formed. Later on, Ward and his clients recognized that LAMDA supplies the necessary foundation for lean product development. An organization's ability to effectively execute the other practices depends upon the quality of their LAMDA cycles.

LAMDA is the on-ramp for lean product development. It is easy for an individual to try on his or her own to get a taste of lean product development, and build the company-specific case for it, and it is the first thing that an organization needs to spread across development if they want their lean product development efforts to bear fruit.

LAMDA is Fundamental

A client of mine helped remind me about how central LAMDA (Look-Ask-Model-Discuss-Act) is to lean product development. LAMDA is Allen Ward's expression of Plan-Do-Check-Act, which is itself an expression of the scientific method we were all taught in seventh grade science. It is the problem-solving tool that Taichi Ohno used to invent the Toyota Production System. If PCDA works for Toyota, then why do we use LAMDA for lean product development? Because Allen was teaching impatient Americans who couldn't wait to get to the Act step.

I was guilty of this myself. I would do a little bit of Planning, Do a little bit, spend a few quick minutes Checking and then run off to Act - if I bothered to do all the steps. More typically, we'd skip the Plan-Do-Check (we know what to do already and we know it's going to work), and jump straight to Act. Is it any wonder why casual implementations of lean tend to fade away?

Allen dug a little more deeply into the kinds of things that went into the Plan step to find out what was actually happening. He found Look: go to the source, get direct experience with the problem , then Ask: seek the root causes, look for reusable information. He found heavy uses of visual and physical Models to eliminate misunderstanding, improve communication and drive better decision-making by making a person's thought process visible to others. Then seemingly endless (to an American) rounds of Discussion to deepen understanding and build commitment before arriving at a decision. But the actions worked and the decisions stuck, saving enormous amounts of time and energy over implementing a solution that does not work, or revisiting a decision because it does not have everyone's commitment.

The LAMDA cycle is foundational to lean product development because product development is fundamentally about solving problems as effectively and rapidly as possible. The cycle creates the conditions necessary for deepening our personal technical knowledge and developing solutions that make the most of our organizational knowledge. It directly attacks the wastes of reinvention, unproductive meetings, organizational silos and product-centered development.0

For more information, check out my LAMDA knowledge brief.

Allen Ward's Lean Product and Process Development

I'm pleased to tell you that the Lean Enterprise Institute has finally published Dr. Allen Ward's book on Lean Product Development. Although the HP team only knew Allen for a very short time, his impact on our work was immense and I am happy to see that his ideas are living on.

Dr. Ward's work was left unfinished when he died in a plane crash on May 31, 2004. The manuscript for this book was written mostly in 2001, and it doesn't reflect some of the major insights from the last years of his work, such as the LAMDA cycle to organize Plan-Do-Check-Act for knowledge workers. Some terms have evolved - the 'entrepreneurial system designer' is now commonly known as the Chief Engineer.

True to his spirit, Allen begins the book with a challenge: "How can you make all of your development projects make a lot more money -- and have more fun at the same time?" His voice filled with "tough love" for engineering managers and his passion for excellence shines through every page of the book.

Durward Sobek and John Shook helped organize his unfinished manuscript, and the result is much better than I would have expected. They have filled in a couple of missing pieces and provided much-needed context in the foreward, leaving the rest as Allen had it.

This is now the first book I would recommend to someone to learn about Lean Product Development.