From Project to Product, Powered by AI (Sort Of)

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile   Artificial Intelligence   Product Management  

A few years ago, you probably started hearing occasional mention of the shift from project to product. And then that phrase started to gain popularity, and some organizations began to restructure their agile teams in order to make the concept reality.

But then it kinda stalled. And some organizations didn’t really see the potential. And some teams didn’t understand the purpose.

But now we have another emerging disruptor, in fact the largest disruptor any of us have likely seen: artificial intelligence. And that may just breathe new life into the whole project to product thing.

What is project to product, and what are the challenges?
The concept of project to product emerged as a result of the growth of DevOps, and in particular the idea of continuous delivery. The theory is that there is no point in structuring work into projects, initiatives or whatever label you want to apply if there is the ability to work on an application continuously, releasing new functionality, performance enhancements, bug fixes, or whatever as soon as they are production ready.

As a result, these applications are considered digital products with the agile teams assigned to them, viewed as product teams who persist on a permanent basis. (Or at least, for as long as their work is delivering value to that product.)

It makes a lot of sense. Teams can continue working through …

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