Lean Product Development Conference IX
October 6-7, 2010 Minneapolis
“Knowledge Wins and
Creates Growth”

Register Now

The Savvy Consortium© presents the Lean Product Development Conference IX. This Savvy Consortium Conference identifies with people who give it a name that is relevant to what they are trying to accomplish. For example, your Product Development system may best be describe by one or more of the following titles:

• “Agile Product Development”

• “Flexible Product Development”

• “Rigorous Product Development”

• “Innovation Product Development”

• “Back to Basics Product Development”

• “Knowledge Worker Product Development”

• “21st Century Global Product Development”

• “Cadenced Product Development”

• “Concurrent Product Design and Development”

Which title you use is important because your intent is growth and the best system to develop products that achieve growth.

This ninth Savvy Conference focuses on the efforts of product development and engineering managers who pursue GROWTH. The speaker are managers who develop their people while simultaneously developing new products, improving product performance, improving people performance. They are simultaneously transforming themselves and their organizations. They are making the transformation to the “knowledge first” PD systems to launch products that deliver growth.

Engineering managers from a variety or product/markets and industries will describe their knowledge first product development systems and how their system works. They will describe their transformation initiatives and how it impacts their people competence growth. These speakers will detail how they benchmark the thinking and practices of Savvy product development organizations; how they think through and design their own best practices to build/sustain people competence, reduce design risk, improve design robustness and meet their commercialization schedules.

These product engineering managers’ presentations are rich with practical knowledge content. The speakers “lived experiences” make reference to fourteen principles, the five pillars, and the tools/practices described in the popular product development management books.

Most importantly, the unique feature of this Savvy Conference is the introduction of the Six Virtues of the Trusted Leader. Trust is the essential (and often missing) attribute in the organization of high competence, deep knowledge people whose behavior change is vital for transforming product development into a high performance system.

Because the term ‘lean’ is inadequate, the Savvy Consortium uses the term “Knowledge First” Trust Based Product Development System. This system’s thinking/practices essentials engage engineering design people and helps them pursue excellence in their work. People make the system and its processes work to impact product performance and development project team performance.

Confirmed Speakers:

Wednesday October 6, 2010

“ForeKnowledge: Knowing the New Product’s Market Value”

Don Remboski, Vice President - Dana Corporation

Management Principle #1 of the Knowledge Based Design and Development System is: “Establish Customer Defined Value to Separate Waste from Value Added” Knowing customer value is the first task that drives a portfolio of “value added” product development projects that are waste ‘scarce.’

Don Remboski will describe the model he uses at Dana to generate and measure the ‘value to the customer.’ This market knowledge then drives the analysis of growth opportunities. It prioritizes product development opportunities for projects and funnels them into the resource commitment system. This model is vital to continuous improvement at the front end: it eliminates non value development work. This model also provides direction for the chief engineer or heavyweight project leader that manages the product through the development system. The chief engineer uses this model to measure the value added work and eliminate wasteful practices.

Market Value models are needed to align with growth goals, prioritize technology development, and organize new product development projects in knowledge based product development organizations.

“Knowledge Based Product Development Organizations, Located Globally or Locally, Require the Virtues of Trusted Leadership”

Deborah Savage, Ph.D. - University of St. Thomas

Product development organizations are increasingly located in different countries to better serve markets and deploy people of diverse cultural beliefs, thinking and practices. Dr. Deborah Savage will present the system of virtues needed to successfully engage these organizations in personal/professional development that produces product/profit growth in their enterprises.

Dr. Deborah Savage managed high performance Asian workers in West Coast firms. Her experiences led to her conduct fundamental research on the drivers of Japanese and Asian work behaviors in which sustained productivity improvement is a given. Working as a clean room production manager, she generated deep experiences that led to her findings and conclusions about work beliefs and personal virtues that sustain excellence of work and engage people in the pursuit of professional growth and development. Dr. Savage will describe the work virtue system and its impact on problems solving, decisive action, and sustained growth in people and their productivity. Product development managers charged with new product/profit growth will learn the fundamentals trusted leadership that engage technical knowledge workers located locally or globally.

“Knowledge First thinking/practices with Vendors”

Merle Meyer, Vice President - Rapid Refill Corp.

In today’s uncertain economic outlooks, the importance of Suppliers has increased. The reduction of technical people has increased dependence on vendors because they have the knowledge needed for components and subsystems design. Merle Meyer’s 25 years experience with high technical competence vendors in Japan and other Asia based countries has shown the impact of discovering and using vendor knowledge to optimize product design. Merle will describe the technical knowledge in his vendor’s tradeoff curves, and its impact on product design thinking/practice. He will detail set based design concurrent engineering, knowledge visualization practices and how he discovers this vital knowledge that vendors have and share.

“Managing Sustained Improvement in the Knowledge Based Product Development Organization”

Bob Melvin, Director of Engineering - Teledyne Benthos

Bob Melvin applies “back to basics” thinking to sustain the improvement of his organization’s Knowledge Based Product Development System. Bob will describe how the system works, how people engage in using K-Briefs and evaluation meetings. He will describe how they are using check sheets and improving their SharePoint site usage, processing K-Briefs.

Bob will describe his thinking and practices that work well as he currently does complete review of the development process from start to finish to make sure everyone is following the same rules.  Bob will show how and why each engineering group was doing things slightly different with lots of good ideas that not everyone was using.  Bob will describe the impact of this review on the energy and engagement of each person as they go through the process.

Bob will also describe his focus on software development and finding optimal ways to use in creating bug free code.  Working that issue quite vigorously right now.

Sustained improvement that engages technical knowledge people, raises product performance, manages product cost and meets schedules greatly generates the cadence that delivers growth.

Wednesday October 6, 2010 Deep Savvy Knowledge-Experiences Sessions

Session 1 “Managing Product Development Vendor Knowledge”

Session 2 “Build the Trusted Leader System of Virtues”

Session 3 “Value Propositions and Cadence Product Development”

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Thursday, October 7, 2010

“Global Product Development Collaboration Using Set Based Design Concurrent Engineering thinking/practice”

Ettore Cosoli - Dana Corporation (Italy) and Don Remboski, Vice President - Dana Corporation

Dana corporation’s design groups in Italy, Belgium, and USA teamed up to solve a customer design problem. They learned, adapted and successfully used set based design concurrent engineering thinking/practice. They will describe how they generated sets of design solutions that changed the product performance economics and improved the already high competence of the design engineers located in different design centers.

They will describe the professional and personal impact of this design effort on the design engineer experts. They will explain how the set based design system generated collaboration among people from different cultures. Collaboration, using set based concurrent design engineering, raised the individual and collaborative competence to levels which were higher than expected.

“How Knowledge based product development and  agile software development tools improve design while simultaneously build people talents.”

Gene Kania, Director of Program Management - CA, Inc.

Customer collaboration defines the design more effectively than a design checklist.   Responding to change is the path to pursuit of excellence in work at the design level. Gene Kania will demonstrate how several methodologies in the system work: scrum, dynamic systems development, value proposition driven development, simple design, test driven design., small releases and communication.

“Transforming People and their Thinking/Practices at Boston Scientific”

Tom Ebertowski, Director of Knowledge Driven Product Development - Boston Scientific Corporation

Tom Ebertowski will describe how he serves the product design teams as they learn and build competence in “learn first” product design and development work. Tom will describe the impact of this major transformation on people, processes, tools and systems in a highly regulated medical product/market category that is fiercely competitive.

“A New Culture Model for Linking Engineers’ Responsibilities and the Tools They Use in the Knowledge Based Product Development”

Dave Hein – Vice President of Engineering, Nexen Group

Dave Hein was a true believer and early adopter of knowledge based product development. Adapted in 2004 and fully vetted in 2005, Dave Hein’s knowledge based product development system is the most frequently reference development system in the true believer community of product engineering managers. As a result, Nexen has replaced its existing product line since 2005, with new products. Dave developed the product development system. He simultaneously engaged the design engineers who developed successful new products and built their competences. Their superior competence and the cadences of successful design launches were based on applying the knowledge based product development thinking/practices. Knowing customer problems, developing sets of solutions, generating technical limit curves, tradeoff curves and concurrent engineering resulted in opportunities for advancement for these engineers.

Needing to replace his key performers, Dave designed a new model culture for design engineers. The idea is to expand the design engineers’ work responsibilities and integrate the engineering tools they need to leverage their work. Nexen’s new model gets design engineers involved in pro-actively learning customer problems. They become expert in translating customer problems into product design problems. They advance their skills in developing sets of solutions and systems engineering. They experience the work involved in converging on the optimum design and then design the optimum product for manufacture. They learn and use the tools, methods and practices needed to do this work well.

“Technology Creation Thinking/Practice: Knowledge Generation Model for R&D”

Sam Landers - former R&D Senior Fellow and, currently, advisor to R&D at Goodyear Corporation

Technology Creation is the early and essential task needed to reduce design risk and increase knowledge that creates innovation. Sam Landers has developed an R&D process to reduce design risk and impact design readiness for the product development process. Sam will show how this system separates out R&D from Design and Development and how this separation impacts design risk, R&D decision making, and the “excellence of work” from scientific knowledge worker.

Separating technology development from product development results in waste free tradeoffs among three variables: “uncertainty vs. technology readiness vs. time.” Right thinking in the technology creation process leads to good decisions and the means to achieve the good/optimum/robust design.

Sam Lander’s model of the Technology Creation Process (TCP) shows the visuals of technical knowledge generation, push-pull,  flow and timeline.  This TCP model aligns with the Market Valuation Model.  Technology Creation practices are necessary for constantly improving the way corporations feed technology knowledge into their “learn before design” knowledge based product development system.

Thursday October 7, 2010 Deep Savvy Knowledge-Experiences Sessions

Session 1 “integrating agile, flexible management tools”

Session 2 “technology creation vs. product development task management”

Session 3 “Transformation to Value Proposition Thinking/methods”

CONFERENCE SPECIAL FEATURES

Deep Savvy Knowledge-Experiences Sessions Following speaker presentations, conference participants’ will group into savvy building sessions. The groups will discuss: presentation learnings (nuggets), relevance to current their work, ways to visually show to their organization, and expected impacts. Patterned after Set Based Design learning, these Savvy learning sessions ensure that you see the variety of thinking, the application , the impact on their people and the value that conference participants expect from initiating changes that work for the speakers.

This fresh, practical learning helps you get the most out of the speakers experiences and their learnings. Speakers themselves will observe the learning in these savvy learning sessions.

SAVVY CONFERENCE MATERIALS BINDER

Savvy conferences include a complete binder comprised of speaker materials and a variety of A3 visuals useful for communicating with colleagues. A valuable reference that other conferences do not offer.

The Savvy Product Development Transformation Leader’s Reference Source You will receive Savvy members’ compilation of books, management working papers, and links that describe knowledge based Lean product development principles. Reviewed and rated by Savvy members, this guide describes books, management working papers, authors worth reading, and links. This unique guide offers the product development transformation leader critical professional knowledge that impacts personal and professional development.

“Virtuous Leadership” by Alexandre Havard
This is the learning that leaders need to transform themselves personally. So that they can engage people professionally. This is the knowledge transformation leaders need to help other people in their organization commit to change/improve/transform in their own pursuit of excellence in knowledge based product development work culture.

Knowledge First Product Development – American Style This is a Savvy Consortium visual that shows how the Wright Brothers identified the design problems, the knowledge gaps, and the fundamental thinking that drove their work and generated the knowledge they needed to develop a “person carrying glider.” Their development work is a valuable demonstration that has influenced and will continue to lead generations of innovative technical people in their pursuit of innovation, value, and excellence.

GROUP DISCOUNTS

Savvy offers discounts to persons from the same organization as follows:

Groups of 3 or 4: simply deduct $50 per person.

Groups of 5 – 10: simply deduct $100 per person.

Contact the registrar regarding these discounts

Tools, thinking/practices and methods you will learn about include:

• Product Concept Value Propositions

• A3s used in constant improvement management practices

• A3 visual documents

• Set based design concurrent engineering

• Towering engineering competence development

• Process problem solving rigor

• Obeya visual for project team decision making space

• Waste reduction that improves productivity

• Project management using the chief engineer model

• Waste elimination via value stream mapping

• Convergent design decision making process

• Lamda learning cycle: Look-Ask-Model-Discuss-Act

• Pull/push knowledge flow management

• Project leader focus on customers’ value expectations

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Savvy Consortium Lean Product Development Conference IX
Wednesday-Thursday, OCTOBER 6-7, 2010

HOLIDAY INN BLOOMINGTON
1201 WEST 94TH STREET 35W & 94TH STREET
BLOOMINGTON, MINNESOTA 55431 - located 10 minutes from MSP.

Conference Cost: $995

“Value Now” Registration Package: Register before JULY 20, 2010 and receive two books: the classic Management Challenges of the 21st Century and Managing for Results, both by Peter F. Drucker - the leading thinker in customer focused, waste free management.

Register Now

Why Attend Savvy Conference IX?

You are sure to:

Learn how a variety of others are designing innovative new products and constantly improving their organizations & systems, successfully and simultaneously!

Generate your own useful knowledge of fresh, new, management savvy practices that you can adapt with the confidence; these practices build competence and commitment to constant improvement.

Get timely knowledge you need to confidently find opportunities for better market focus and waste reduction in your project selection.

Meet engineering managers from a variety of product development engineering organizations who are solving problems, constantly improving and meeting their schedules simultaneously.

DO NOT MANAGE Product Development ALONE IN 2010!

All of this is yours at the Savvy Consortium’s Conference IX, North America’s only semi-annual lean product development management conference with the richest tradition of deep, practical, experiential knowledge.

Get the experiential knowledge that you need to shift from your anxiety rich “reaction” mode to a calm, rational “respond” management style that sustains you through the current market uncertainty. Above all look for opportunities to generate growth forward and out of the recession.

Put Savvy on your October 6-7, 2010 calendar.

Knowledge Wins and Generates Growth! Sales growth and people growth!

Event content, presentation materials and presenters may change without notice, but with intent to maintain or increase quality and relevance.