After designing diesel and natural gas engine systems for more than 37 years, and then supporting academic researchers to commercialize new technologies, it became clear that major changes were needed to the way new products are designed. This was not just a Systems Engineering issue, nor was it one that resided only with Design Engineering, but a more effective combination of the two. Essentially, in a product’s concept design phase, a holistic understanding of a design’s lifecycle success elements must exist, and then (and only then) can a product be efficiently configured around them. Without being "requirements-led" and designing from a system-level perspective, costly and time-consuming redesign work (or design churn) is inevitable, easily accounting for hundreds of million dollars of waste annually for large organizations.

Another problem is that few senior leaders intimately understand the design process, and fewer yet understand how to provide the design team with the information they need to prevent inherent redesigns.  This has been witnessed by first-hand by experiencing the waste associated with M&A investments; exceedingly and unnecessarily high program development costs; using cross-functional resources extremely inefficiently; and going to market either slowly or with compromised lifecycle success.  The root of the issue is always the same – the team (even if experienced and capable) tried to configure their product around a very incomplete set of (this buzzword called) “requirements”.  And it is a buzzword, as is the phrase “Design Right the First Time”, is nothing more than a multi-billion-dollar aspiration for most companies. That is, until they’ve proficiently applied the Lean Program Management approach, that provides a practical way and streamlined way for a New Product Design team to place a specific emphasis on the holistic quality of a new design in the earliest phases of the design process.

Lean PM is a proven methodology created when designing the world’s largest high-speed diesel and natural gas engine platform, in problem solving, and on other power system products.  The methodology has been applied successfully more than 400 times to support new product designs in industry and academia.  Now that it can be managed by the development of a new software tool supported by AI and with an upgraded user interface, "Design Right the First Time" can become a practical reality. The Lean PM Digital Design Thread tool provides the design team with the "requirement" knowledge they need, and a means of tracking it, to normalize the design performance of new products across product types and large organizations. 

The Lean PM Digital Design Thread tool can be applied to the “design” of ANY product or technology – hardware, software, controls, business strategy products, etc., all of which should be using a “requirements-led” and system-level design structure to efficiently achieve their product lifecycle goals.  It has been successfully used on many new technologies and different types of products, proving that it provides an effective framework for efficiently using a program’s budget and cross-functional resource to expedite a highly successful product to market.