Preston G. Smith

Preston G. Smith received a Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford

University and for the next twenty years held engineering and

management positions in the aerospace, automotive, highway

safety, defense, and diversified industries. In 1984 he initiated a

corporate time-to-market program, and for the next twenty-nine

years, he was a Certified Management Consultant specializing

in accelerated and flexible product development techniques.

Consulting and training engagements for products as diverse as

semiconductors, heavy-duty trucks, and packaged food have taken

him to hundreds of venues in thirty-one countries.

Preston’s interest in development flexibility has been brewing

for years. His first book, Developing Products in Half the Time (with

Donald Reinertsen; originally published in 1991), covered the core

of flexibility—iterative and incremental development—in its fourth

chapter.

Another part of flexibility, responsive experimentation

(Chapter 4 of Flexible Product Development) includes rapid

prototyping (RP), which Preston started following in 1988. More

important, super-rapid prototyping machines, often called 3-D

printers, appeared in 1996. Although some people denigrated 3-D

printers as a “poor man’s RP system,” he saw the very low costs

and quick response of such systems as opportunities to radically

change how organizations develop new products by harnessing

this quick, inexpensive feedback. He led these developments by

keynoting at an RP conference in Australia in 1995, and he has

participated in six other RP conferences in Australia, the United

Kingdom, South Africa, and the United States since then.

Preston has urged the community to transform product

architecture (Chapter 3 of Flexible Product Development and Chapter 6

of Developing Products in Half the Time) from a solely technical

matter to a business strategy topic, although its role in enhancing

flexibility during development is still not widely appreciated.

The tipping point for him was in 2004, when the Agile

Development Conference (ADC) invited him to keynote. Agile

development aims precisely at flexibility, except that it only

pertains to software development. Having started his career in

the 1960s immersed in programming, he had been observing

software development for years. It impressed him that software

development projects have experienced more than their share of

spectacular failures, but this community has studied its failures,

done impressive research on methodologies, and improved—to a

greater extent than non-software product development, he believes.

Although software developers have a lead in understanding

their methodologies, the 2004 ADC invited Preston to speak—

characteristically—to see what they could learn from an allied

field. They rather confused who was the teacher and who was the

student. As a result, he has attended other agile conferences since

then, joined the Agile Alliance, and was a founding member of the

Agile Project Leadership Network (agileprojectmgt.com)—and he

took plentiful notes. As a result, what the agilists have achieved

in software development inspired him to write Flexible Product

Development, which provides comparable means for developing

other types of products flexibly.

Preston retired in 2013 and resides in Portland, Oregon USA.

Here are short descriptions of his three books:

DEVELOPING PRODUCTS IN HALF THE TIME has become a classic in the time-to-market literature--90,000 English copies in circulation plus six translations. It was published originally in 1991, with a paperback update in 1995 and a second edition in 1998.

PROACTIVE RISK MANAGEMENT was written because Preston found that--even though Chapter 12 of Developing Products in Half the Time covers project risk management--companies were doing poorly at it. Specifically, companies with a phased-development process would typically identify and document project risks in an early phase. But then they would do nothing about these risks, and when the risks blossomed later in the project, it was embarrassing to see that they had been predicted. This book won the David Cleland Project Literature Award from the Project Management Institute in 2003 as the best project management publication in 2002.

FLEXIBLE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT recognizes that, as the world has become more chaotic, it is unrealistic to presume, as we usually do in our plans, that the project will proceed to completion without changes. In fact, it is the nature of innovation that the project should change as we learn more about the customer and the product. So, instead of denying change, this book embraces change by reducing the cost of change and keeping options open. It aims to do for non-software products what agile software development has done for that field.