Michael Lutton > Michael's Quotes

“Since high capacity utilization simultaneously raises efficiency and increases delay cost, we need to look at the combined impact of these two factors. We can only do so if we express both factors in the same unit of measure, life-cycle profits. If we do this, we will always conclude that operating a product development process near full utilization is an economic disaster.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“without variability, we cannot innovate. Product development produces the recipes for products, not the products themselves. If a design does not change, there can be no value-added. But, when we change a design, we introduce uncertainty and variability in outcomes. We cannot eliminate all variability without eliminating all value-added.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“To manage product development effectively, we must recognize that valuable new information is constantly arriving throughout the development cycle. Rather than remaining frozen in time, locked to our original plan, we must learn to make good economic choices using this emerging information.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“if we incentivize conformance, people will insert contingency reserves to prevent their tasks from missing the schedule. The more granular the schedule, the larger the schedule reserves. And these reserves aggregate into even longer timelines. The more we increase planning detail and the harder we try to incentivize performance, the worse our problem becomes.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“Reducing risk, which is the primary mission of testing, clearly creates economic value for product developers. In fact, reducing risk is so centrally important to product development that it is indispensable for us to quantify its economic impact.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“In product development, our greatest waste is not unproductive engineers, but work products sitting idle in process queues.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

“when product developers choose to operate their processes at high levels of utilization, they create unnecessary and wasteful variability in their processes. It is important to realize that this variability is a self-inflicted wound.”
― Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development