1 introduction

With the continuous improvement of programmers’ experience and qualifications, they are no longer satisfied with daily business moving bricks, but also strive towards the direction of technological innovation. For low-level technical students, maybe the optimization above can be done well, but for high-level students, systematic thinking ability is particularly important, which needs to do a good job in technical planning. In an era of big front-end frameworks, technology planning seems to be the equivalent of the wheel. Whatever happens, give a new framework a try, such as RN or Flutter. If there is another pursuit, directly start their own implementation, such as Weex is Vue language version of RN, in ali system is also mixed wind. But in recent years, the new technology of the big front end tends to be stable, and there is no longer so much bonus to eat. In addition, many companies are also forbidden to repeat the wheel. As a business development, how can we make technical planning in the daily heavy business development?

What is technical planning

Planning means a relatively comprehensive and long-term development plan made by individuals or organizations. It is the thinking and consideration of the overall, long-term and fundamental problems in the future, and the design of a whole set of plans for future actions. A plan is a vision for the development of a particular area that incorporates multiple elements and perspectives. -Baidu.com

According to the definition of Baidu Encyclopedia, technical planning has several characteristics compared with daily technical optimization:

  • Integrity: the technical planning must be a systematic thinking of the existing system, and come up with a comprehensive overall improvement plan, instead of staying on some specific optimization points
  • Long-term: The technical planning cycle is usually quarterly, semi-annual or even annual, which means that this matter is relatively long-term and stable and needs to be continuously promoted
  • Directionality: Technical planning needs to put forward a long-term goal and design a comprehensive development plan and action plan for a certain direction

Significance of Planning

3 How to make technical planning

preparation

  • Business analysis technology is not a castle in the air, it must serve business scenarios, which requires technical students to deepen their understanding of business. There is a sentence to deepen business understanding summed up: “stand in the perspective of the business side, on the premise of understanding the business development goals, clear business development direction, make a balance between technology and business”. So the first thing to consider in technology planning is business value. Don’t think about technology. Don’t plan for the sake of planning.

  • Industry benchmarking when you want to solve a problem, to believe that you will not be the first encounter, perhaps the industry has a good solution, so the technical planning needs to do enough preparation, full research to see how others are to solve the problem, whether it is suitable for your scene, more benchmarking, and then start. Technical students tend to have the impulse to do things by themselves, and often feel that only by building the wheels themselves can they have a sense of achievement. In fact, isn’t it more effective if you can adopt a mature solution to solve the problem at the lowest cost?

Set goals

In general, SMART(S=Specific, M=Measurable, A=Attainable, R=Relevant, T= time-bound) criteria are used to determine whether your goal is Attainable.

Of course, there are some factors to consider when setting goals:

  • Revenue: Aim for business benefits, such as revenue, efficiency, and experience. Don’t set a goal where the revenue is not clear.
  • Technology: From the perspective of technology, it can be divided into three levels: existing expansion or in-depth mining, new direction exploration, and trend judgment. The further the level is about to test the technical judgment ability of technical students, which needs a lot of accumulation.
  • Team: Is the goal affordable for the existing team? Can the team support the technical capability? For example, building a mobile operating system may not be something that a small or medium-sized company can consider, and perhaps only large companies like Huawei and Ali can achieve it.

An example of technical planning goals:

Achieve within XXX time:

  • XXX system availability is 99.99%
  • XXX system online faults
  • XXX system response time 90 lines

Task decomposition

After the goal is set, it needs to be disassembled to form an executable plan. In the process of task decomposition, several points need to be noted:

  • The task decomposition of panorama is not without rules, which is especially a test of the technical leader’s overall view of technology. Only by having a broad vision to see the panorama of the whole thing, can we better disassemble it at the macro level. With Meituan comments on financial platform Web front-end technology system as an example (image: tech.meituan.com/2018/03/16/…). :

    I believe that having this technical panorama is a great help in task breakdown when doing technical planning. Planning to do things can be easily broken down according to the hierarchical diagram layer by layer, or broken down according to different framework systems, but also for a layer or a framework module can be subdivided goals set, making the goal more accurate and easy to measure.

  • Clearly executable Sub-tasks should be clearly executable, and the sub-tasks or sub-goals should follow the SMART principle. At the same time, the sub-tasks should be closer to the final result, easier to execute and easier to measure in the future.

The execution plan

After task decomposition, it is necessary to make an implementation plan, which is the same as doing business requirements. It is necessary to break down one thing into details, evaluate working hours, assign people and schedule projects. There are a few things to note about the execution plan:

  • Set milestones

    For a long-term technical planning project, after task disassembly, it can be divided into several sub-directions or sub-projects for parallel development. In addition, the cycle is long. If the results are verified after completion of all the tasks, there will often be very large deviations. The establishment of milestones is very important. On the one hand, it can encourage confidence in the team’s periodic victory results, and on the other hand, it can quickly verify the small steps to avoid major direction errors.

  • High-risk projects For high-risk projects, it is necessary to take a quick trial-and-error approach, take small steps, and achieve rapid results in stages at the early stage. First do demo for technical verification, then try in a small range, and finally precipitation for application.

  • Project management can be divided into stages according to time. Monthly plans can be divided into weeks or days, and long-term plans can be divided into months. Task splitting and estimation of granularity should also be moderate, split out of every thing can be tested to verify the effect, but at the same time should not be too large (1 to 3 days of workload is best), so as to improve the accuracy of workload estimation, and the future plan adjustment is also more flexible.

The risk assessment

The implementation process requires constant assessment of risks, which fall into two categories: technical and management risks. Technical risk: in the early stage, we need to evaluate the technical feasibility, fully investigate the best practice in the industry and find the right technical solution based on the team skills and echelon situation. We must remember not to be carried away by the “disruptive” idea. Management risk: whether the team is adequately staffed and whether the technical demand cannot be sustained due to business peaks and troughs needs to test the judgment of the technical leader on future business. Meanwhile, the technical leader should fully communicate with the business team and reserve some fixed proportion of manpower for technical needs to ensure the long-term nature of the technical project.

To carry out

In the process of implementation, the project reached a milestone, and it was necessary to stop to summarize and review to see whether the current position was getting closer to the target and whether there was any improvement in the review process. At the same time, the plan was adjusted and improvement actions were made according to the current status. Planning is to better adapt to tomorrow’s changes.

4 to sum up

Technical planning includes five links, including clear objectives, task decomposition, execution plan, risk assessment and implementation. Each link requires technical leaders to think carefully. Technical planning is not only a glamorous thing on the surface, but also requires solid attention to details to be implemented. Finally, when it comes to technology planning, people tend to think of all kinds of fancy, cool technology, and not the dirty work. However, we need to carefully think back to the origin of technology, any technology is to serve the business, how to select the right technology and reflect the business value is really worthy of students to explore.

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