Death to Stage-Gate

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 are interested in a framework for the systematic improvement of product development through organizational learning, there is information in this article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/framework-systematic-improvement-product-development-dantar-oosterwal

If you’d like to learn more about the transformation to Lean Product Development at Harley-Davidson, there is information here:
https://theleanmachine.org

If you would like to learn more about Lean Product Development, you may be interested in an on-line seminar with information here: http://leanfrontiersdirect.com/lean-product-development-lean-frontiers-direct/

Related Article: Why do organizations expect the result Lean Product Development delivers but are unwilling to do the work?
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reflecting-dr-allen-ward-why-do-organizations-expect-oosterwal?published=t