Should you have Projects?

Some claim you should manage products, not projects. Projects are a huge drain on resources, requiring to stop what people are doing, gather a diverse project team and that will focus only on the project until… the project is completed.
What would be recommended instead, is have fixed teams to whom you give portions of the project work, and manage dependencies between teams if several teams are required. The stable element being the product, and the systems that constitute it, you should rely on product experts to understand what is to change, implement the changes, deploy, run and operate. Organizations typically underestimate the lifecycle of their products, and projects discourage long term investments in the delivery (development, testing and operations) pipeline.

Focus on the product and invest in its evolutivity, they say, and you will find that the resulting shift will make your changes much smoother, allowing you to bring changes faster and of higher quality, will less regressions.

Well. They are far from being wrong. I actually learnt to become of huge advocate myself, of merging development and maintenance in teams. You build it? You run it also, then.

But not all changes are equal. Some projects touch upon several systems and products. Some remove parts, or add new ones. Which teams should take the work, then? Also, how do you maintain consistency across different teams? How do you communicate and preserve the design decisions, the philosophy? How do you create a sense of togetherness that is required for mutual help towards the delivery of the expected outcomes of the project?

I have felt this in rare Program Increment (PI) Planning events, when several teams were presented a challenge and abandoned the silos of their respective teams, to embrace re-teaming, more suited to tackling the new work streams.
But projects do not always nicely fit an existing (slow) pace or defined set of existing teams.

I can’t think of any reason to abandon projects altogether. I think they also bring an opportunity to create a renewed feeling of mission. I have fond memories of some (very) big room kick off meetings, where the energy created was palpable, that contributed a lot to the sustained levels of communication across a large number of people.

But projects need to be kept as short as possible, and eventually succeed- or fail- but end clearly.

Yes and. Yes to products. And yes to projects.