Not to be confused with initiatives
Introduction
Projects is mainly an organization and funding mechnism for delivering parts of initiatives. If the initiative has many projects, and asking for funding for each of them requires you to group them, then that might be a case for introducing one or more programs to fund larger parts of the initiative or to fund projects across initiatives even.
Projects do not set direction, they spend capital and assign labor. A project is a time-bound operational envelope with a budget, a team, a deadline, and explicit deliverables.
Product teams are durable, but projects are disposable: they get funded, hit their constraints, ship deliverables, and dissolve.
While we believe in durable teams, funding should still come from the finance and represent a kind of company wide in order to ensure our capital allocation is still smart.
Read more about initaitives here
Components of a project
It defines capital allocation (money), resource allocation (people), finite time (deadline), and specific success criteria (objectives). It should
- Resource allocation, a project should always create a budget for what it will spend, both of internal resources time, and money it needs allocated.
- Finite time, deadlines for each task, deadlines for the total, and a rolling review of whether we will hit it or not
Objective alignment
Traditional project management has had a notorious past of "the operation was a complete success, but the patient died", with strict deadlines that are never met, a set scope that keeps changing and victim blaming.
This is why all projects needs to define both metrics that they will be measured on after a set period of completing the project as well as be connected to one or more clearly defined objectives.
To prevent runaway, disconnected rogue projects, they cannot have their own objectives. They can pick objectives from the initiatives, and have their own metrics (also known as key results), that are parts of the main metrics (also known as key performance indicators).
Deliverables and workstreams
A stream is a temporary grouping of mostly human resources working to deliver one or more delivarable and is bound to the project lifecycle