Episode transcript The transcript is generated automatically by Podscribe, Sonix, Otter and other electronic transcription services.
Hi everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas and this is the 5 Minutes Podcast. Recently my youngest daughter came to me and said, dad, what is delivery cadence? And she was completely lost trying to understand. And it's for me, it's great because it's wonderful for a father having your kids asking questions that are very much related to what you do. So I was very happy to explain to her, but then I said, you know, maybe it's better to record a podcast and in five minutes trying to explain this and try to give meaning to that. So what is the delivery cadence? What is this meaning? It's how you intend to deliver the products or the services of your project. Remember, every single project that exists on this planet aims to deliver a product or a service. It can be a house, it can be a software. It can be a new product. It can be a new marketing campaign. It can be a new travel. But it's a product or service that you deliver. And of course, let me go start from the last flexible to the most flexible. Of course you can have a cadence that is a single delivery. It means at the end of the project I deliver the product and that's it. So between the beginning and the end, you don't deliver anything and everything you deliver at the end. This is called single delivery. Of course, nobody uses that anymore. Why? Because nobody has time and nobody has, I would say the willingness to put money and wait until the very, very end to, for example, collect the benefits. So then it goes to the second type of delivery cadence, Multiple delivery. Is where you create milestones in your project, and you split your project into relevant milestones, and these milestones, they are not periodic, okay. It can be one milestone after one month, the other milestone after five months, the other milestone after eight months, the other milestones after 15 months. It doesn't matter, but at each milestone you deliver something that adds value to your value chain. This is the concept of multiple delivery. It's very common in capital projects, very common when you receive, for example, the contract or receive payments for the delivery. For example. It's very common in construction, in industrial works, etc. then we change to the world of agile and agility and mostly product development, innovation, software development is what is called periodic delivery or timebox delivery. It's when you create a timebox. It can be weekly every, 15 days, every three weeks, and you call this sprint or iteration depending on the method you are using. And in this periodic delivery you are creating an expectation for, for example, stakeholders that will be down in the value chain of your project to know, okay, in two weeks I will have this and that deliverable ready, and then in two more weeks I will have other deliveries and two more weeks other deliverables. So I will have deliverables down the road from the beginning up to the end. This is what I'm calling periodic delivery or timebox. Very common in software. Probably most of the people using Scrum, Agile, Kanban are using that. And last but definitely not least is very common in web projects and also app mobile apps. Is continuous delivery. It's very attached to the DevOps concept and it continuous delivery. It's mostly for digital products. It's when you have something ready, you just make it available because you want to harvest the benefits as soon as you can. Have you seen mobile applications in your phone, for example? Every single day. Some of them update every day there is an update. Every day there is an update because when something is ready, people don't wait. For example, the end of the sprint to, I would say to collect the benefits, but what is the main topic here is not just discuss single, multiple, periodic and continuous delivery. What I want here is just to make sure you understand the meaning. Why we do that? We do that because we want to improve predictability in our project. Projects are one of the less predictable things you may do in your professional life. Because it's volatile, it's challenging. It has a lot of risks. It has a lot of unknowns that you need to address by doing a delivery cadence. You manage expectations from different stakeholders. They know that at that point, you will deliver something that will be built into something that will be built into something. Then at the end, the project will deliver the functionality, the goods and the services you were expecting. This is why you use. And one final point. Remember, delivery cadence is not something that is only on the agile world or software world. No, you need to have a cadence and delivery cadence in every single project. And of course, single delivery exists only in books. Nobody, no single, even capital projects, they do not tolerate, for example, that you build a power plant and you do it in a single delivery. It's when everything is ready, every single power plant they start with one engine, then another engine, then another. They start collecting benefits and they go improving. They will never start 24 engines at the same time, for example in the hydroelectric power plant, because this makes no sense. And this in terms of financial viability is just a madness. Think about that and see you next week with another 5 Mminutes Podcast.
