Lean Product & Process Development Guiding Principles At-A-Glance

A successful lean product and process development (LPPD) system adheres to six guiding principles, asserts Jim Morgan, LEI senior advisor of LPPD and author of Designing the Future. The principles arise from the tenets of lean thinking and practice but address the unique challenges faced by new product, process, and services development teams. Here are the principles at-a-glance:

• Putting People First: Organizing your development system and using lean practices to support people to reach their full potential and perform their best sets up your organization to develop great products and services your customers will love.
• Understanding before Executing: Taking the time to understand your customers and their context while exploring and experimenting to develop knowledge helps you discover better solutions that meet your customers’ needs. 
• Developing Products is a Team Sport: Leveraging a deliberate process and supporting practices to engage team members across the enterprise from initial ideas to delivery ensures that you maximize value creation.
• Synchronizing Workflows: Organizing and managing the work concurrently to maximize the utility of incomplete yet stable data enables you to achieve flow across the enterprise and reduce time to market.
• Building in Learning and Knowledge Reuse: Creating a development system that encourages rapid learning, reuses existing knowledge, and captures new knowledge to make it easier to use in the future helps you build a long-term competitive advantage. 
• Designing the Value Stream: Making trade-offs and decisions throughout the development cycle through a lens of what best supports the success of the future delivery value stream will improve its operational performance.

The LPPD Guiding Principles provide a holistic framework for effective and efficient product and service development, enabling you to achieve your development goals.