Allen Ward is the patriarch of Lean Product Development and a great debt of gratitude is owed to Allen for his vision in the study of product development systems and his identification of Lean Product Development methods. The product development community tragically lost a thought leader and devoted proponent for change in his premature death.
Allen enthusiastically championed Lean Product Development methods and in his own charismatic way, espoused how these methods were different and better than conventional product development. Although they share fundamental principles, Lean Product Development is not simply Lean manufacturing brought upstream. In practice, Lean Product Development is very different from what we know as Lean in manufacturing and Allen abhorred the thought of this misconception. He attempted to change how people referred to lean product development by calling it 'Knowledge Based Product Development' as a differentiator, but it never caught on. Allen vehemently apposed Stage-Gate processes decrying them as ‘Evil’! In one of my first meetings with Allen he pounded his fist on my desk and demanded that unless I abolished Stage-Gate in my development process, he would not work with me.
Allen began his study in Product Development based on the premise that the optimal design would always evolve through the simultaneous optimization of all parameters to a design and proposed the notion of a ‘Design Compiler’ to accomplish this. His PhD study at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) was based on this concept of design optimization through simultaneous evaluation of design parameters resulting in his thesis on a design compiler. Following MIT, Allen continued to pursue the idea of a design compiler at the University of Michigan where he taught. He and his colleagues set out to look for evidence of this method in industry. To Allen’s dismay, they found no evidence in industry to support his concept until they came across the practices at Toyota. Allen dove in to understand the Toyota Development System with vigor as he saw it as proof not only of the feasibility of his concept, but also verification of its superiority as a design methodology – a methodology they later called ‘Set-Based Concurrent Engineering’.
Allen was very charismatic in his passion to persuade change to the way product development is done outside of Toyota. He would captivate anyone who would listen with his stories of how the Wright Brothers invented Lean Product Development and how the principles were a staple in the airplane industry until the advent of computers. He loved to tell how these methods allowed the P-51 Mustang, the best piston-driven plane ever developed, to go from idea to flying planes in 6 months during World War II. Allen claimed that these methods developed by the Wright Brothers but later lost to the airplane industry, found their way to Toyota after the Second World War. After the war there was not much need for airplane designers in Japan, so Toyota, in great need of engineers, hired engineers from the defunct Japanese airplane companies. These engineers brought with them the development principles that had been pioneered by the Wright Brothers, and the techniques were adopted into the Toyota learning organization. In contrast to Ford at the time, Allen identified that Ford operated through a structure of ‘command and control’ where knowledge is focused on a few leaders who directed others to do the work, while Toyota recognizing that they had few knowledgeable or experienced people, set out to learn collectively, record what they learned, and actively build their knowledge base with every project. Allen referred to this as ‘visible knowledge’ and a common characterization of this visible knowledge are limit or trade-off curves.
Although Lean Product Development is so much more than Limit and Trade-off curves and Set-Base Concurrent Engineering encompasses far more than just engineering as the name may imply, Allen championed the idea of limit and trade-off curves. He attributed much of Toyota’s success to their diligent quest to create ‘re-usable’ knowledge. This specific tool is an important element in the larger context of Lean Product Development. At the time of Allen’s death, he was writing a workbook entitled ‘Visible Knowledge for Flawless Design’ to teach this tool.
Following Allen's death, two books have been completed to share his ideas. The first is titled, 'Lean Product and Process Design' and was completed by Durward K. Sobek III. The second is the manuscript he was working on at the time of his death titled, 'Visible Knowledge for Flawless Design' completed by Dantar P. Oosterwal and Durward K. Sobek III. There are links to both books in the left sidebar. There is also a link to a recorded lecture Allen presented at SAAB related to his work. The link is also in the left sidebar.
