In order to cope with the ever-changing market environment and user demand, agile development has become the mainstream software development management mode in many enterprises. However, for large teams, agile project management is a great challenge. In general, large teams have three characteristics: functional teams, teams of more than 100 people, and concurrent development of multiple projects. These characteristics make large teams face greater challenges in agile project management: difficulty in aligning goals, difficulty in managing risks, and difficulty in measuring. Mr. Chen Liangyu, head of PRODUCT and basic business of ONES, shared his “Practice and Thinking of Large Team Agile Project Management” based on his years of agile practice.
These three challenges arise at three different stages of agile project management. Next, I will introduce how these three challenges exist in the process of agile project management of large teams, and propose solutions to help large teams better cope with the above challenges in agile project management and achieve efficient agile project management.
Challenge 1: Difficult to achieve
Before the agile project starts, functional organizations make and disassemble goals in a functional dimension. After the management makes strategic goals, they convey them to the R&D team layer by layer, while the r&d personnel need to understand the goals, and then they need to trace back layer by layer. However, the goal disassembly process of functional teams results in continuous information dilution, which makes it difficult to align the mission with the strategic goals.
Challenge 2: Managing risk is difficult
Identifying risks is the first and most difficult part of agile project management. The difficulty lies in the fact that a team is a combination of people, and each person has his own perspective and way of thinking in project execution. Besides, the goals of functional teams are not aligned and the information is not transparent enough, which ultimately leads to the delay in risk tracking and feedback.
Challenge 3: Measuring is hard
In the project review stage, the team needs to analyze and inspect the team performance for continuous improvement. In some traditional large teams, the R&D and engineering data between different departments are often scattered in different platforms, relying on project managers to collect and analyze data between different systems, which greatly increases the time cost. Moreover, different statistical standards of data between different systems lead to insufficient data accuracy.
In addition, senior engineers usually get more attention and become “star employees” when performing performance analysis on members with different experience. Although junior engineers have been trying to improve themselves, their performance results are not as good as those of experienced senior engineers, so they are easily ignored. The team is gradually polarized and their ability is slowly improved.
So how should the challenge be met?
From “people” and “things” two aspects: people, namely “organizational structure” and “team culture”; Things, that is, “execution process.”
Transition to A “Business team” A “business team” is a fully functional team that is organized to achieve established business goals. Changing the organizational structure of a large team is risky, so we can take a small pilot and gradually penetrate approach. Taking the above functional team organizational structure as an example, during the adjustment of organizational structure, we separated employees from different functions and formed a virtual project team to pilot agile R&D management, so as to cultivate their agile consciousness and verify the effect.
The success of organizational structure transformation requires cultural transformation, such as regular high-quality sharing meetings, knowledge and experience sharing, etc. Only by constantly allowing members to receive positive feedback from the transformation can the transformation develop sustainably.
“PDCA Cycle” manages the R&D process. PDCA stands for Plan, Do, Check and Act.
In the planning phase, we need to align goals and develop a product roadmap to solve the problem of inconsistent goals between teams and make goals simple, clear and transparent. When developing a roadmap, we recommend differentiating the R&D roadmap from the business roadmap outside the R&D department and implementing visual tools.
The business roadmap must be formulated with the participation of the business departments. It should be a complete “roadmap story” with clear scope, and the user story “should always be expressed in a business language that the non-production and research teams can understand” to improve communication efficiency.
In order to reduce the loss of information caused by layer-by-layer transmission, we advocate face-to-face communication, unified roadmap and clear dependency relationship when developing the R&D roadmap. It is also recommended to use user stories as the smallest unit of the roadmap to keep the roadmap firmly aligned to the business goals.
Plan the product roadmap
In the implementation phase, we need to solve the above “risk management” problem. Shortening the fixed time box is an effective way to improve the risk identification ability, such as using an iterative cycle of 2 weeks. In addition, during iteration planning meetings, the team needs to clarify the story and, more importantly, the risk, and throughout the development process, the team needs to continuously identify and deposit the risk into the team knowledge base.
ONES Risk Management
In the measurement analysis stage, we need to measure the effectiveness of the team and its members through transparent, objective, accurate and authoritative data, so as to help the team continue to improve and stimulate the potential of the team. One-stop R & D management tool helps to collect data at all stages of a project, realize automatic statistics, and improve efficiency management efficiency.
ONES Performance R&D Performance management
Based on the results of performance analysis, the team can scientifically adjust and improve. The roadmap adjustment still needs to ensure that r&d is involved with other business units, always “fine-tuning” the roadmap with strategic goals.
Thinking in practice
First, we need to look at agile and focus on goals over form. Whether it’s organizational transformation, risk management, or performance management, we’re all focused on goal alignment, and agile landing helps us focus our goals better. Second, digital collaboration is a must. Information unity is the premise of goal unity. Only process landing tools can efficiently share information, scientifically quantify the process, and provide a strong basis for the improvement of team efficiency.