Allen marched into my office with authority, slammed his fist down on my desk with a loud bang and proclaimed, “Damn it Dantar! You’ve got to abolish stage-gate! Its evil – Kill it or I’m not working with you.”
Dr. Allen Ward was brilliant, a bit eccentric at times, but that was part of his charm and effectiveness. I had convinced Allen to work with us to improve product development at Harley-Davidson. Now just a few meetings in, he was demanding I abolish the backbone of our development system. The entire organization was focused on stages and exits? I had grown up with Stage-Gate systems. It was comfortable. It’s all I knew. Abolish it?
It was after this conversation that I really began studying my metrics and with Allen’s coaching started looking at numbers I had always monitored in a different way. When I looked at my data differently I came to realize that over the past 5-years there had been absolutely no correlation between stage-gate exits and successful projects. All my effort had been focused on forcing the organization to work harder to get their exits on time. What a waste! But, that’s what I had been taught, and all I knew.
Before the obituary for stage-gate is prematurely written, let me say that stage-gate has value, just not as a development process. Stages and Gates can be effective for fiscal oversight, but makes for a very poor development framework. But replace it with what?
Shifting to a Set-Based, Lean development framework driven through Integration Events drastically improved our throughput and predictability. It’s not an easy switch, and I found much of what Allen taught me to be counterintuitive. But the efficiency and effectiveness of a set-based, Lean development framework is well worth the journey.
Why do organizations persist in using an ineffective development framework? Is it all they know?
If you’d like to learn more about the transformation to Lean Product Development at Harley-Davidson, there is information here: https://theleanmachine.org
