(370e) Project Flow: Lowering Wip to Increase Productivity and Throughput

In New Product Development (NPD), it's not about just getting one project completed faster; it's about meeting all your commitments: getting new products launched, improving and supporting your existing products to keep customers happy. It's about getting your entire portfolio of projects done faster and well. It's about deploying all of your resources effectively for maximum productivity and project throughput.

Project Flow is a powerful solution that begins globally by reducing work-in-process (WIP) and ends locally by giving product developers clear work priorities. In this talk, you will learn the following:

? Why it is absolutely essential to reduce WIP in order to increase productivity and throughput. ? Some simple techniques to gate the start time of projects to capacity rather than starting all projects ASAP. ? Why all NPD projects need safety time built-in. ? The most effective way to add safety to NPD projects. It may be a lot different than how you do it today! ? How to create urgency and focus for product developers without creating stress and burnout. ? How to establish task-level priorities for product developers at the local level that are properly aligned with your business strategy and portfolio at the global level.

At the end of this talk, you will recognize that Project Flow breaks the mold for how to manage your portfolio of projects and your resources. But, in doing so, Project Flow will allow you to achieve a level of productivity and throughput that will help you to win customers and markets and to stay well ahead of competitors.