What's Next? : Organising Complex Product Development with Lean

Abstract: An everyday question asked during complex product development work is, ‘What to do next’? Not just because the development in itself is advanced and integrated, but also because it is planned and performed in large organisations, in difficult projects, and across organisational lines. There have been different approaches to try and reduce the difficulty of having to organise complex product development, primarily through using different kinds of management models. One such model is Lean product development which has become one of the most used management models within product development organisations.Like in other management research fields, Lean product development still struggles with understanding and describing social interactions; even though their importance has been widely acknowledged. To address this shortcoming, I have adopted a framework: knowing-in-practice and shown how it applies to complex product development.The purpose of this thesis is to explore organising Lean product development as knowing-in-practice by asking: How flow and value are practiced in complex product development work? Fow and value - as constituting concepts for Lean - have been explored using a literature review, which revealed their current interpretations as they apply to complex product development. Though the use of knowing-in-practice an analytical and epistemological framework, four practices and underlying action patterns where identified. These patterns organised complex product development work, while practising also produced flow and value in the work it organised.This has shown that understanding flow and value are situated and produced as a form of outcome from talk. The results indicate that the de-contextualized and overly generalised descriptions that have prevailed in the Lean product development field do not adequacy capture the concepts of flow and value. In the presented practices both the importance of organising complex work through talk is made evident, as well as the situatedness of flows and value. As recursive patterns of action, the practices are what, in this study, is made repeatedly in organizing product development, where everything else is seldom the same. The only constant in organising complex product development work is the continuous question of “What’s next?”.