PLM Library · Book
The Principles of Product Development Flow
Second Generation Lean Product Development
- Author
- Donald G. Reinertsen
- Publisher
- Celeritas Publishing
- Year
- 2009
Summary
Reinertsen adds an economic and flow perspective to product development, applying queueing theory and lean thinking to the management of engineering work.
Across 175 principles it covers the economics of product development, managing queues and batch sizes, reducing variability, controlling work in process, feedback and fast learning, and decentralizing control — arguing that development performance improves when flow, not utilization, is managed.
Our verdict
Recommended reading for anyone managing development capacity. It changes how you think about utilization, batch sizes and queues in engineering — dense, but the most rigorous treatment of why development work stalls.
Who should read it
- —Engineering and R&D managers struggling with overloaded teams and long lead times
- —Lean and agile practitioners extending these ideas into hardware and engineering environments
- —Portfolio and program managers interested in the economics of development decisions
How it relates to your work
- —Explains why high resource utilization lengthens development projects — a common root cause of slipping schedules.
- —Batch-size and WIP principles apply directly to engineering change processing and review cycles.
- —Provides the economic framework for quantifying the cost of delay that PLM and process improvements aim to reduce.
Keep in mind
- —Dense and principle-based rather than a step-by-step method; expects the reader to translate ideas to their context.
- —Not about PLM systems or product data — it addresses how development work flows, not the tools that support it.