QCon, hosted by InfoQ China, will be held in Beijing International Convention Center from May 29 to 31, 2021. Feng Bin, co-founder and CTO of ONES, was invited to participate in the conference and shared with everyone ** “Digital Project Management Practices of Large Software Teams” **. This speech deeply analyzed the core pain points of more than 100 large software teams in project management, and combined with the practical experience of ONES and customers to discuss how to achieve business growth through digital.
When we talk about project management
What are we talking about
Why do R&D teams do “project management”? Improving quality, reducing rework rates, reducing costs, and improving delivery speed can all be summed up as: we want to ensure r&d efficiency, improve efficiency, and deliver business value better and faster. To this end, the technical manager introduced the project management method, trained team members for many times, and recruited a full-time project manager /Scrum Master to promote the project management transformation.
Even so, however, some teams still experience low levels of satisfaction from the business unit. The reason is that project management is only regarded as a means of software team management, while ignoring that software projects generate value through business. We should also consider project management as a whole.
For large software teams
Value growth flywheel
Feng Bin discussed how large software teams can achieve business value growth from three aspects: “management by Objectives”, “organizational management” and “end-to-end digital project management”.
Management by objectives
The team needs to form a consistent cognition and consensus on the target and focus on the target. If the target deviates too much, no matter how excellent the implementation is, it is difficult to produce value. So how should managers set goals?
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Think globally, look down on the present and plan for the future
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Set five-year goals, make three-year plans and implement one-year goals
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Prioritize “adding business value” goals
Organization and management
Organizational structure design and team culture shaping are the core means to strengthen organizational management.
Typical organizational structures are divided into ** “functional” and “business”. Different organizational designs reflect the way an organization allocates resources and works with teams.
With the change of organizational development stage, organizational structure design is also dynamic. So how to choose the right organizational structure for the current stage of the team? We can analyze the “business challenges” and “technical challenges” that the team is currently facing and choose the appropriate form of organizational structure.
It is important to note that “functional” and “business” teams are not black and white, and depending on the team, there may be both organizational structures within a software team. When team size increases by more than 50%, managers need to make quick decisions and adjust the organizational structure.
It is also important to strengthen team culture, the key to which is to clearly define team values and implement them from top to bottom. The importance of values is self-evident. It can be seen from the NLP neurologic hierarchy model that the values represented by the upper three layers can affect people’s behavior and team environment.
End-to-end digital project management
Project management of large teams often encounter problems such as target alignment, team innovation, process standardization and continuous improvement, which need to be solved by establishing end-to-end digital project management solutions.
- Goal alignment
When the big goals are not aligned, work does not generate business value even when it is completed. By breaking down goals into tasks, r&d execution can be kept in line with top-level goals.
ONES project plan, WBS target decomposition
In practice, the team as a whole needs to focus on the goals and cut out the ones that are valuable but less important. ** setting priorities ** is an important means of focusing on goals.
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Take one out of nine and prioritize the most important tasks
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Prioritize all tasks using quantized priorities
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Use software tools to let teams share priorities and align all members
Quantifying “priorities” in numbers makes it clearer
2. Team innovation
Team members follow the same rules and lack of innovation is another factor holding back an organization. In project management, improving the organization’s information transparency, precipitation and sharing team knowledge can build team security, improve team efficiency, and stimulate team innovation and creativity.
The ONES Wiki brings team knowledge and transparency
3. Process standardization
The reasons why workflow standards are difficult to be implemented can be summarized as follows: high implementation cost, process standards limit innovation ability and long cycle for team members to form new habits. So how to solve it?
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Razor principle: streamline the process, the unnecessary process is shaved off
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Process standards ensure a lower limit, such as 70%, without precise control
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Solidify process standards into tools for automation
Use tools to document process standards and train the team to ensure consistency of standards and transparency. In practice, the process can also be solidified into tools to achieve automation and large-scale application of the process. For example, after submitting code, the task status is automatically updated; The status of the parent task is automatically updated according to the status of the child task, which can greatly improve the execution efficiency of the standard process.
The ONES Wiki establishes process documentation
4. Continuous improvement
Quantitative feedback is the premise of effective recovery and improvement, and sufficient project data is the premise of quantification. Through the one-stop R & D management tool, the efficiency data generated by the whole process of R & D can be counted and analyzed to measure team efficiency more objectively and scientifically, review improvement tasks, and put them into the task list according to the priority, so as to realize continuous cyclic improvement.
To sum up, in digital project management, large software teams should consider from the overall direction of enhancing business value and realize efficiency improvement through the growth flywheel of “management by objectives”, “organizational management” and “end-to-end digital project management”. The flywheel blades are interdependent and push any one of them to turn the flywheel. Business value can be increased faster when all three blades are driven simultaneously.