Top Highlights

• Perhaps the single most important weakness of the current orthodoxy is its failure to correctly quantify economics. The key word is correctly.
• today, only 15 percent of product developers know the cost of delay associated with their projects.
• Cycle time is only a proxy variable.
• The danger in focusing on proxy variables is that proxy variables interact with one another. Raising capacity utilization has the beneficial effect of improving efficiency and the negative effect of increasing cycle time. To understand the net impact, we must combine both effects. To do this, we must express changes in all proxy variables in the sa...
• queues are the single most important cause of poor product development performance. Queues cause our development process to have too much design-in-process inventory (DIP).