Taiichi Ohno: Toyota Production System (TPS), Lean Production, Just-in-time (JIT) & the Toyota Product Development System (TPDS)
Eliyahu M. Goldratt: Theory of Constraints (ToC), Critical Chain & bottleneck theory: Goldratt has shown, that all processes that have “dependent events” and “statistical fluctuations” in their flow, will always have a bottleneck. He showed us how to use the bottleneck to increase the performance (through-put) while minimizing flow-time (time-to-market). ToC is very good suited for processes that are repeated, as in production or as repeated steps within Product Development (e.g. testing). ToC has its limits when the area of development gets more uncertain, more complex und thus unplannable. Here, short time-boxed iterative, incremental and self-organized, adaptive approaches (such as Scrum) are better suited.
W. Edwards Demming: Systems Thinking, PDCA cycle
Peter F. Drucker: Knowledge Work and self-organized teams
Peter M. Senge: Systems Thinking as the “Fifth Discipline”
Allen C. Ward: Knowledge-based Product Development, Visible Knowledge, Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD).