15 Course Module 3: Production – Engineering a concept into reality for adoption
Introduction:
Creating an idea is only 10% of the challenge: 90% of the barrier to success is producing and delivering the idea. Every idea, once written, becomes a conceptual prototype suitable for testing and evaluation before final review and investments are committed. In this skill module students learn how to use system thinking processes to construct a concept and engineer an innovation into a meaningful reality suitable for consideration.
Systems thinking in production management involves bringing a concept into reality using a complex, interconnected step-by-step process rather than independent stages of isolated tasks. It emphasizes understanding how different elements combine into a process (technology, teams, timing, and other factors). This approach helps identify activities for improvement, anticipate unintended consequences, and optimizes overall performance to bring elements together that accomplish a mission.
Systems thinking is a holistic approach to problem-solving that emphasizes understanding about how different parts of a sequential process interact and influence one another within a larger whole. Going beyond breaking down problems into isolated components, it focuses on the relationships between the steps in the process as components of the total effort. This approach is useful for analyzing complex situations and predicting consequences of potential changes to achieve a result. In this case, a result that proves a concept is viable and relevant to real-world commercialization.
Systems Thinking Discipline: Plan, Do, Study, Act (21)
There are several types of systems thinking project management disciplines that are iterative cycles of learning, decision, and action. For the purpose of the applied Innovation Principles course, the focus is on Edwards Deming’s methodology Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA). This is a method for reducing risk and uncertainty with an iterative process to resolve problems, evaluate functionality, and refine elements of a prototype before wider implementation of the innovation requires considerable costs and human resources.
Resolving Death Threats
A PDSA event is triggered when addressing a problem or question while engineering a concept to become a reality. These problems are called Death Threats – situations where failure will kill the ability to get the innovation approved and financed for deployment.
Plan: The activity starts with a PLAN to define what is to be accomplished to pre-mitigate the death threat. The plan to resolve the death threat should be broken out into phases of activity. Every plan should have tangible objectives that are used to measure success.
Do: Once the PLAN is established, the next step is to articulate what will be done to prove the plan is successful – or not. Evaluated measurements are recorded for further review.
Study: At the conclusion of conducting the DO stage, the most important part of the PDSA process is the STUDY step. This is where the practitioner stops and reflects on what was done and learned during the activity. Was the PLAN achieved, was the death threat eliminated, how can the concept be improved, what are considerations for pivoting or continuing?
Act: After the Study stage, the next phase is ACT. This is where the project leader makes a decision about what to do next based on what was learned in the PDS cycles. A decision may be made to kill the project or pivot to find another approach to achieve the mission.
