Author /PingCode RESEARCH PV Jingyun Sun
A recent customer asked: What’s so special about PingCode when all the tools are pretty much the same today?
So to answer this question, I might start with the roots.
First of all, PingCode has a complete theoretical foundation in terms of product construction concept
Let’s say the company has a goal, and in order to achieve that goal, employees are there as a resource, taking on jobs that machines can’t do. The idea is that the job of all managers is to get what they need from their employees. This approach to management, well established since the industrial age, treats employees as a resource whose role is to “work for the boss”.
** For labor-intensive industries, this approach is enduring. ** Because the work content of such employees is highly repetitive and easy to be standardized, managers can formulate specific codes of conduct and provide incentives simply and directly through detailed assessment standards and clear reward and punishment clauses.
** But for knowledge-intensive industries, it’s hard to get great work done this way. Because their work is often customized and creative, they need to be transparent and communicative on a small scale. If the employee’s mind is focused on “working for the boss”, there are a hundred ways he’s not doing his job. ** Far from being an alarmist, seven out of 10 employees are “disengaged,” according to Gallup, who either disengage or actively sabotage their organization’s efforts.
So is it the employee’s fault? The bottom line is that employees aren’t “doing things for themselves,” that they’re not engaged, that they’re not “having fun” at work.
If IT is refined to the IT industry – RESEARCH and development field, I think we should weaken the word “management” of management, and pay more attention to the word “management” of management. For example, a management model like this:
1. The foundation of r&d cannot be separated from the support of tools, which can maximize the release of employees’ hands, which is very obvious for the improvement of efficiency. For example, building CI/CD through DevOps tool chain not only speeds up the deployment process, but also provides the possibility of another R&D scenario. Of course, tools are by no means static. They will evolve according to the actual development of the enterprise, bringing a new generation of efficiency revolution.
2, ** Based on the same toolset, we can more easily unify technical specifications, such as programming specifications, engineering solutions, CI/CD, infrastructure and documentation standards, etc. ** The purpose of unifying technical specifications is to standardize the R&D process, because standardized behavior is easier to replicate, resulting in economies of scale.
3. With a unified technical specification, enterprises can rebuild their r&d workflows. ** Workflows are like water flowing into a pipe, from left to right, following defined rules. We need to find bottlenecks in the pipe early and solve them, and make the workflow more efficient and deliver more capacity through continuous improvement.
4. Within the constraints of certain process systems, we can set up many cross-functional teams, empower them, allow them to manage themselves, and create greater value by activating the creativity and intrinsic motivation of brain workers to “do things for themselves” and “enjoy” their work.
5. Building a high-performance agile team is not the goal, but achieving corporate goals. ** Therefore, self-organizing teams should have a set of goal guidance mechanism. Objective management mainly includes two points: first, what is our goal; The second is how we know we’re moving toward our goals.
Through the above management model example, we can find that the main job of r&d managers is not to “whip” employees, but to create a “win-win” working environment, guide employees to the right track, so that they can give full play to their value in a certain free space.
So how does PingCode’s product matrix reflect “the way the R&D world is managed”?
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Quite simply, PingCode itself is an important one in the toolset, and PingCode also has the ability to open up other tools (through REST apis and the app marketplace).
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PingCode Wiki is a repository of technical specifications and processes within the organization.
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PingCode Plan, PingCode Agile and PingCode Testhub make it very easy to build a standardized R&D workflow that is ready to use.
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PingCode Agile allows Agile teams (Scrum and Kanban) to plan their work, show true progress, review, and constantly improve themselves;
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PingCode Goals can be used to make all projects have common Goals and keep abreast of the progress of enterprise Goals from a higher perspective.
PingCode website
Second, rather than looking at individual function points, it’s better to look at PingCode’s workflow together
PingCode organizes functions according to scenarios, so I’ll start with a scene diagram:
(Scale Agility)
** In a healthy IT organization, a sound decision is usually fully researched and evaluated before IT becomes the target of various R&D departments. ** In this process, the key players in the enterprise need to align their goals and keep everyone on the same page. How to use PingCode Goals to manage Goals? Please refer to: “How did the first OKR SaaS vendor in China manage r&d objectives?”
** After the goal is determined, some key work items should have a clear landing Plan, which needs to be planned through PingCode Plan. ** In PingCode Plan you can clearly see the time nodes of all work through the roadmap, which corresponds to the “feature” nodes in the “Scale Agile” diagram.
Next, in PingCode Plan, arrange these work items into the “to-do list” of the various Agile teams, allowing the self-organizing teams to schedule development work within a certain time interval:
Going into the PingCode Agile requirements List for every Agile team, self-organizing teams can see the requirements in order of priority.
Agile teams arrange their work for each development cycle based on a combination of factors ** (usually: priorities, workload, dependencies, proportion of non-functional requirements, etc.), and they produce a deliverable increment at the end of each development cycle. **
We then integrate all of the Scrum team’s completed services into a global version, which is deployed into production, corresponding to the PROD node in the “Scale Agile” diagram.
Finally, all departments and business leaders can review the progress of target completion through PingCode Goals in the synchronous meeting of enterprise Goals. An ideal review meeting should make follow-up decisions based on certain behavior records and data analysis.
Finally, PingCode is more comprehensive and has a more natural experience
Because PingCode has so many function points, I’ll give you just a few examples:
1. 360° correlation of user stories
** In PingCode, a user story is both a point of business value and a platform for communication. ** You can see a lot of information on a user story, such as some basic information, including: status, owner, follower, start and end time, priority, risk, story point, requirement source, requirement type, release version, tag, description, custom fields, etc. There is also relational information, including: subtasks, defects, relational work items, relational test cases, relational documents, relational attachments, and so on; There is also development data, including: code submission records, review records, build records, deployment records, and so on; There is also interactive data, including comments, card activity records, status flow records, and so on. It’s kind of a card, full latitude data.
2. Planning iterations (for Scrum team planning meetings, on the big screen)
3. Iterative retrospectives (for Scrum team retrospectives on the big screen)
More feature points, I recommend you to experience, I don’t boast. Hopefully this article illustrates what makes PingCode special and helps you find a more appropriate development management tool.
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