Lean Product Development - Derailed?

It is difficult to pin down exactly when Lean Product Development was born. Certainly Womack and Jones touched on the subject on a number of occasions in Lean Thinking in 1996. A year later in Managing the Design Factory, Don Reinertsen introduced many concepts that trace back to an intelligent analysis of Lean principles and the Lean Manufacturing toolbox – although the Lean label was not applied. Five or six years later the term Lean Product Development was becoming more widespread and more definitive studies were published in 2007 (James Morgan, Jeffrey Liker and Allen Ward).

Recently though I have noticed a worrying development regarding the use of the term Lean in the context of Product Development.

At best it is the inappropriate application of tools from Lean Manufacturing. I’m sure some measure of improvement can be achieved by carrying out a 5S exercise in the R&D lab or even by a larger stretch of the imagination by drawing up a Value Stream Map for the whole product development process. But, are these activities really going to produce the promised dramatic improvement in time to market or product success?

At worst it is the re-labelling of existing tools that have been around in various guises with other labels attached. It saddens me to see references to QFD and DFMEA in the context of a lean product development process. I even saw the Lean label attached to Stage Gate recently…

Maybe I’m being too precious about the use of the Lean label, but it looks like the fundamental application of the principles and concepts of waste elimination in the product development process are being derailed.