Mike Lyons explains three delivery modes: no projects, project delivery with fixed scope and timeline, and product delivery with continuous funding and market-based success metrics. Projects are temporary with managed budgets; products are long-lived teams measured by outcomes.
In this lesson we're going to look at three distinct delivery modes and we're going to start off with one called no projects. And it's a bit of a funny one to start with because I've never actually seen it in real life. But here's what we know. This concept of no projects, it's a movement away from both temporary fixed term projects as well as away from alignment to say, products. It's about focusing on ongoing improvement and delivery of outcomes that provide value. We're not going to spend a whole lot of time on it because again, I just don't see it in the field. Instead, we're going to spend our time on the next two delivery methods because you're certainly going to come across these as a project manager. And the first one is the idea of a project delivery mode. Well, this definition, it comes to us from the Project Management Institute, pmi. We think PMI probably knows a thing or two about projects. The thing I want you to focus on here is the temporary nature of projects. Every project has a start and an end and that's key. We have a very specific schedule that we're tracking to this is hugely impactful. When we think about how we're going to go about delivering under the project delivery mode with that schedule, we have two other angles of the iron triangle, that's cost and scope. We have to manage to all three of those things when we're running a project. Okay, so let's switch gears to the product delivery mode. So what's a problem? That mobile device in your pocket, that's a product. With the product delivery mode, I don't have a start and stop time with the product. What we have as long live teams that are continuously funded. They're funded as long as the product is still bringing value to the company. And when it stops doing that, we stop funding it. And rather than performance being tied to cost, scope, schedule, it's linked to the outcomes, the value the product is delivering in the marketplace. Are we seeing higher adoption rates, more sales, are we getting more clicks or whatever outcomes might look like for the organization. And because it's continuous, products are better able to keep pace with with ever evolving business needs. Okay, so there are some overviews of how projects and products differ and you're going to use that information in this upcoming exercise and we're going to get into that right now.
