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Milestone Buffer Chart: The Most Important Report You've Never Heard Of

David Paulson - 02/14/24 04:31 AM

In previous posts I’ve written about reports that are meaningless, misleading, and even damaging. (Yes, the last one actually causes your projects to...

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Burndown Charts Don't Work for Hardware

David Paulson - 01/30/24 03:19 AM

In a previous blog post I explained (and hopefully convinced you) that measuring “percent complete” literally causes your projects to take longer.

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Resource Loading - How a Small Error Can Double Your Schedule!😧

David Paulson - 01/6/24 11:23 PM

Would you believe that a 10% increase in the workload on your teams could double the length of a project? 

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Your Favorite Report is Delaying Your Project

David Paulson - 12/6/23 03:15 AM

Most companies are trying hard to achieve predictable end dates.

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Predictable End Dates - One Company's Journey

David Paulson - 10/19/23 01:01 AM

One of the most difficult things about making process improvements is knowing where to start. Doing the wrong thing is a waste of time and money, and...

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Cost of delay: how to calculate it

Eric Graves - 03/5/23 04:13 PM

Here is a simple formula for quickly estimating Cost of Delay: the profit lost per-month of delay.

Total COD = Lost Month Cost + Peak Reduction Cost.

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Applying agile to hardware development (part 1)

Eric Graves - 02/5/23 06:00 PM

Agile development

Yes, Agile principles can be applied with benefit in hardware product development (Agile hardware development). However, Agile's...

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Agile principle 1: early and continuous delivery of value

Eric Graves - 01/5/23 06:21 PM

In the next three posts we discuss Agile principles and how to apply the principles in hardware development. In this post we look at delivering...

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Agile principle 2: welcoming changing requirements

Eric Graves - 10/5/22 05:22 PM

Agile principle 2: Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.

Software and hardware product development teams share important...

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Rolling Wave Planning - A Step-by-Step Guide

Paul DeLong - 08/15/19 11:50 AM

If you want your product development projects to run smoothly, you need to have a regular cadence for long-term planning, short-term planning, and...

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Daily Standup

Paul DeLong - 02/28/19 04:54 PM

A daily standup meeting or scrum meeting is a daily 15-min long meeting where each person spends a few minutes preparing, a few minutes discussing...

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Effective Task management

Eric Graves - 02/20/19 12:15 PM

A lot has been said over the last several years about the fallacy of increased productivity when a person multitasks. Lean, Agile, and the Theory of...

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Decentralized Project Management

Paul DeLong - 02/19/19 05:37 PM

This is the ninth part in our in-depth series on Lean Agile project management.

We've covered a variety of Lean principles that have a direct impact...

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Push vs. Pull

Eric Graves - 02/12/19 02:00 PM

What is the difference between push vs pull?

In a pull system, teams pull tasks from the backlog. As opposed to a push system where work is pushed...

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Resource Management

Eric Graves - 02/4/19 03:09 PM

This is the fifth part of our series on Lean Project Management. In this post, we look at resource management. 

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Lean Project Management Principles

Elyssa Pallai - 01/30/19 11:57 AM

A fundamental principle of Lean is smooth, continuous flow. Flow is achieved by eliminating turbulence caused when the flow through any process is...

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How to Create Highly Engaged Product Development Teams

Elyssa Pallai - 01/23/19 03:55 PM

Our mission is to help engineers love their jobs. It’s what we do. So what makes people love their jobs?

Gallup gathered data from over a million...

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Lean Project Management Methods and Principles

Eric Graves - 01/17/19 01:12 PM

This is the second part of our series on Lean Agile Project Management.

In Part 1 we recognized that one of the primary drivers of success in product...

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8 Ways to Decrease Risk in Project Decisions

Eric Graves - 01/8/19 06:30 PM

So how do you increase certainty in project decisions. In part we can increase certainty by increasing the accuracy of our impact estimates. 

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Cost of Delay Project Model Examples

Eric Graves - 11/27/18 06:43 PM

Project Modeling: Project Management Decisions Based on Profit

How do you make project decisions based on their impact on profit? Here are some...

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Cost of Delay and Project Modeling

Eric Graves - 11/20/18 04:39 PM

In order to make project decisions such as whether or not to add a new feature, we need an economic model. Cost of Delay is one input into this...

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The Benefits of Kanban and Gantt for Hardware Development

Elyssa Pallai - 11/8/18 04:17 PM

Why is Gantt and Kanban such a killer combination in hardware development for accelerating projects? Some of you may instantly recoil at the mere...

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Top 10 Benefits of Lean Project Management

Elyssa Pallai - 09/25/18 11:11 AM

In this post I want to step back from the details in the series on the underlying principles and why they are so important and instead take a quick...

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11 Signs You Need to Look at Lean and Agile Project Management

Elyssa Pallai - 08/9/18 04:31 PM

Taking a product from idea to launch is not a simple task. Projects are complex and when you are dealing in the world of hardware development, you...

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Lean Agile Project Management (Part 2): Which Lean practices deliver the highest ROI?

Eric Graves - 07/19/18 05:47 PM

Feeling like you are using the wrong tools to achieve your product development goals?

This is Part 2 of a series of posts on Lean product...

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What is Lean Project Management?

Eric Graves - 07/17/18 11:48 AM

Feeling like you are using the wrong tools to achieve your product development goals?

This is Part 1 of a series of posts on Lean Project Management...

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Playbook Knowledge Center: Applying Agile to Hardware

Elyssa Pallai - 12/5/17 05:41 PM

At PLAYBOOK it's our mission to help you change the world faster! So, we have a number of free resources available on our website to help you on your...

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4 Ways to Ensure your Product Development Initiative Won't Fail

David Paulson - 04/30/17 12:00 PM

The first attempt to implement Lean product development is critical. If you don’t get it right, there will be more resistance on the next attempt....

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6 Ideas for Transforming Your Approach to Product Development

Elyssa Pallai - 04/14/17 05:51 PM

Effective product development teams are proactive learners. They thrive on change and active discovery and problem solving. In this environment, the...

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Cost of delay: Calculating economic value to increase profit (Part 7)

Eric Graves - 02/28/17 07:26 PM

This is Part 7 in a series of posts discussing Cost of Delay and making objective decisions in new product development, based on economic analysis.

...

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Top 7 Benefits of Visual Management Software

Elyssa Pallai - 01/6/17 11:15 PM

7 Benefits of Visual Project Management Software

Visual work management is critical to speeding up your new product development projects. If your new...
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Early Learning in Hardware Development

Eric Graves - 12/15/16 04:00 PM

Early Learning in Hardware Development

This series is a comprehensive review of Agile and how to apply Agile to hardware product development.We look...

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Making Hardware Development More Agile

Eric Graves - 12/1/16 06:23 PM

Optimizing Hardware Development to be More Agile

So how do you make hardware development more Agile? In this part, part 5, we examine Agile's 3 and...

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Agile Values

Eric Graves - 11/15/16 02:26 PM

Component procurement time, component cost, and the variety of skills needed on most hardware development projects are greater and represent in our...

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Agile Hardware Development: Agile Principles 4 - 12

Eric Graves - 11/1/16 05:25 PM

We agree. Hardware product development is different than software. So when we apply Agile principles, we need a different approach.

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Lean Agile Case Study: SensorLink

Elyssa Pallai - 10/20/16 04:15 PM

We had a chance to talk to Robert Pendergrass, Engineering Manager, about SensorLink's experience with Playbook.

SensorLink develops advanced...

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Visual Project Management Software: Play the game and see what you've been missing!

David Paulson - 06/2/16 06:39 PM

Does this sound familiar? Intuitively you know visual project management software is worth the investment, but how do you effectively communicate the...

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New Thinking in Lean Product Development

Elyssa Pallai - 04/23/16 11:00 AM

Looking for some new material on Lean thinking? This week we have a smorgasbord of big ideas from Don Reinertsen, Michael Balle and the Lean...

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Lean R&D In the Cloud

Elyssa Pallai - 03/29/16 03:36 PM

This is a guest post by Richard Lindstrom from eBOM based in Sweden. eBOM provides cutting edge Lean consulting for R&D companies like SenSair,...

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eBook: Applying Agile to Hardware Product Development

Elyssa Pallai - 03/25/16 04:58 PM

Due to the popularity of our blog series on Applying Agile to hardware new product development projects, we decided to create an easily shareable...

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Lean Product Innovation: Interview with David Paulson

Elyssa Pallai - 03/24/15 10:01 AM

Lean Innovation Interview with David Paulson

David Paulson, our CEO was recently interviewed by

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LPPDE Europe 2014, Copenhagen

Elyssa Pallai - 06/3/14 12:50 PM

Our value added reseller, eBOM, based in Sweden is attending LPPDE Europe and has shared some interesting images and insights into what's happening...

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Lean Startup Methodology and Early Learning

Eric Graves - 05/20/14 05:49 PM

The series explores the relationship between Lean Startup Principles, Knowledge Based Product Development, and Project Risk Management, and how they...

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Lean Startup Methodology

Eric Graves - 03/20/14 06:19 PM

Lean Startup Methodology and Product Development

There has been a lot of discussion about Lean Startup principles and whether they apply to hardware...

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Five Things Innovative, Lean and Agile Project Managers are Changing About the Way They Work

Elyssa Pallai - 02/25/14 11:45 AM

Product development should be fun, exciting, predictable, and of course profitable too. We also believe it is possible to have schedules that satisfy...

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3 Secrets of Highly Successful New Product Development Executives

David Paulson - 12/19/13 02:54 AM

3 Secrets of Highly Successful New Product Development Executives

At Playbook, we work with a lot of great Fortune 500 companies that are adopting...

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Lean and Agile New Product Development Systems and How They Parallel a Fighter Jet Flight System

Eric Graves - 11/16/13 09:27 PM

Being an Aerospace Engineer by training, I find some parallels from time to time between product development systems and flight systems. One that I...

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