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Any job, role, or team in an organization arises to solve some kind of problem in the organization. Performance improvement, the emergence of teams like PMO, the core is to improve the research and development efficiency, organizational coordination, process management. The team should introduce appropriate management or engineering theories and practices to the organization and put them into practice until the sun rises every day. Youzan efficiency improvement team has done some exploration and practice on the improvement of organizational efficiency in product research and development cooperation mode (such as demand management, research and development process management), project management, engineering practice, work order system construction, efficiency product design and other aspects, which are summarized into a series of articles for your reference. This article is a preamble and will be followed by specific thematic articles mentioned in the article. A business organization has two core competencies: business competencies and organizational competencies. Choosing the right track and business model is the business ability; Organizational capability is what underpins an organization to achieve its business goals. Organizational capacity, that is, organizational efficiency, determines the ability of an organization to achieve business goals.

The organization’s mission vision values determine what strategy the organization will adopt, and strategy is the path for the organization to achieve its goals. From the perspective of “things”, the implementation of strategy involves how an organization achieves one thing. From the “people” point of view, strategy determines the organization (what kind of people, what kind of organization). Strategy landing, need to mobilize all personnel of the organization, from the point of view of “business” efficient operation, effective coordination from the point of view of “people”, jointly do a good job of each product and service.

With the development of the business, the size of the organization will continue to expand, which will increase the difficulty of coordination. From the perspective of business, Youzan expanded from the early wechat mall SaaS business to include retail chain, beauty industry, education, Youzan cloud and so on. From the perspective of functional roles, from the early product and technical team, to the later service, operation, marketing, sales and other functional systems have been constantly established and improved. On the one hand, there are professionals in all businesses and posts, which greatly improves organizational ability; On the other hand, as the number of “professional actors” increases, collaboration links become longer and horizontal collaboration becomes increasingly difficult (Adam Smith’s account of the production of a nail in The Wealth of Nations vividly describes this problem). For the product research and development team, multi-business + medium stage, how to use limited resources on the edge, to achieve the research and development goals. The rapidly growing number of merchants VS the ever-expanding organization, how to respond to the demands of merchants in high time and with high quality is a challenge.

Our practice and thinking

1. Establish and continuously optimize the organization’s goal-oriented value stream and workflow

From the perspective of system thinking, the existence of any business organization is a core logic, that is, what is the core value of the organization and what is the value stream. Continuous improvement of the value stream is an important way to improve organizational effectiveness. According to the Why-how-What golden circle principle, this core is to answer why and how the organization exists.

For example, Youzan is a merchant service company. Its core value is to help every merchant that focuses on products and services to privatize customer assets, expand more customers through the Internet, and comprehensively improve operation efficiency and help merchants to succeed. As shown below:

However, the value stream at this level is not yet executable and needs to be further refined. For organizations based on products and services, a refined value stream, a demand life cycle with a product perspective, a customer life cycle with a customer perspective, etc.

Product requirements lifecycle

Product demand life cycle includes product definition, product design, product research and development, product operation and other links, requiring related teams to coordinate with requirements. The product technology team of Youzan has changed from a pizza team (one pizza can feed the whole team) to a stadium team (the annual meeting needs to be held in the stadium) in the initial stage, which precipitate the end-to-end management mode of demand life cycle to lead multiple teams to cooperate to achieve product and business goals. Specifically, it includes product demand to-do list management at different levels, demand hierarchical management (business demand, business demand to product demand), demand hierarchical management, demand value closed-loop management, and supporting demand life cycle management tools. Specific practice summary, can see the relevant special article.

In terms of research and development, various engineering practices related to software itself, such as code neatness, unit testing, CI/CD, etc., are just as basic skills as horse training. As a SaaS software products as the carrier of business services company, these basic skills do not do well, the stability of the whole system, scalability, is no different from being built on sand. The Technical team of Youzan has some practical exploration in the aspects of continuous delivery and improvement of engineering efficiency. For details, please refer to articles such as “Red Light District – Youzan CI/CD Construction Practice” and “Youzan Unit Test Practice”.

Drucker said, no measurement, no management. For example, financial statement is the measurement of business operation, and physical examination report is the measurement of physical condition. So how do we measure the effectiveness of the requirements life cycle? For example, in a restaurant, from the time we sit down to order, to finish the dishes served in front of the time, is a measure of the efficiency of the restaurant operation. This index involves the coordination of cooks, waiters, buyers and other people to effectively improve. For a product development team, how long it takes from a customer to put a requirement on line is also an indicator of the effectiveness of the requirement life cycle. For more measurement ideas and dimensions, see the article “Construction Practice of Praised performance Measurement”.

Customer life cycle

An important goal of a business organization is to satisfy its customers. Any appeal raised by customers in the process of understanding and using Youlike products will be input into the system of commercial organizations, and a result will be fed back to customers after processing, which will make merchants satisfied, enhance their willingness to continue using Youlike products and constantly extend the life cycle of customers. To the client, the organizational complexity inside Uzan is a black box, and he only cares if he can get an acceptable result within a reasonable time frame. How to cooperate with multiple teams to reach Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a very test of organizational ability. For details, see “Practice of Business-based Problem/Demand Response Mechanism” and practices related to “work order System”.

Continue to optimize

Based on the value stream and workflow system of organization goals, the collaboration process is clearly defined from the perspective of “things”, which leads large-scale organizations to cooperate with clear goals and avoids the disadvantages of “being responsible for people rather than things” caused by too much “rule by people”. But the caveat is that such systems need to evolve and remain dynamic. Let participants who hear gunfire have the authority and motivation to improve so that they can continue to function and avoid rigidity. Theories and practices such as Scrum, LeSS, and lean product development emphasize that they are experiential or adaptive frameworks, and practitioners need to refer to these frameworks to practice, experiment, and adjust. Youzan is also based on this idea, constantly adjusting to its own context.

Second, project management in different organizational levels of empowerment

From the construction of the pyramids and the Great Wall thousands of years ago to the Apollo moon landing in modern times, they are all mega projects. These projects involve the coordination of a lot of manpower and the scheduling of a lot of material resources, in which human beings apply a variety of project management knowledge to achieve project objectives. In modern times, it has systematically summarized the theory and practice system of project management, such as PMP and PgMP.

As a classic tool for supporting cross-team collaboration, project management remains relevant in the Internet age. To learn more about how teams can use project management to achieve the organization’s strategic goals with limited resources, and combine performance management to achieve better results, please read the articles on strategic project management and OKR project management practices in this official account. In addition, as a general ability, project management should not become the unique skills of full-time project managers. Instead, it should create a project management atmosphere and give more related abilities to members of the organization in order to improve the maturity of the organization. For relevant practices, please refer to the article “7 Tips to help build a Project Management atmosphere”.

It is important to note that project management is not a distraction. It is a means and a tool, not an end. Agile product development, for example, emphasizes the product perspective over the project perspective, in order to correct excessive “project thinking”, such as the completion of the project itself as the goal, rather than creating customer value as the goal.

3. Productization, online and data-oriented process management

The gentleman is good at faking things, and the weapon in hand can bear dao, method and skill very well. Information, online, intelligent, in changing all walks of life, management is the same. The process management is productized, the management practice is transformed into product practice, so that the management process is online and datalized, so that some quantitative and qualitative operations and analysis can be carried out on the management.

Based on this concept, we developed our own internal collaboration system, called “Performance Platform”, and connected the specific scene with Jira, wechat and other tools of the enterprise, so that the internal collaboration information of the enterprise could interact and reduce the information island. For example, from the perspective of “things”, to achieve goal management, workflow (such as requirements life cycle), project management; From the perspective of “people”, the distribution and load of human resources are transparent. Through kanban, workflow, dashboard flow, transparent, and through enterprise wechat and other IM tools to interact with people, the end-to-end collaboration process is visualized. For details, please read the article “Excellent performance Platform Construction Practice”.

Afterword.

We do efficiency improvement, there are some ideas or thinking logic:

System thinking

A large number of factors in the system are interlinked. If we do not systematically think about the correlation between each other, it is easy to do invalid local optimization, which is not conducive to the overall efficiency improvement of the system, and may cause the waste of resources and the loss of opportunity. Several basic models of system thinking, such as drinking poison to quench thirst, delayed feedback, can often help us to analyze problems more deeply and comprehensively. In many of our subsequent articles, we will attach a system thinking diagram.

Is beginning to the end

The system needs to set goals and start with an analysis of what we can do and adjust to improve performance. For example, our value stream, workflow design, to achieve organizational goals as the starting point of thinking; Our project management, from clear project objectives as the starting point. The current organization as a system, to achieve organizational goals as the starting point, where is the bottleneck? Is it product, technology, operations, services, or intersections? How to adjust the system to improve system efficiency?

Back to the real world

Just as Lean emphasizes “Go See” and “Make your hands dirty”, when designing solutions, we need to put them into real and specific scenarios and consider what they mean to the partners involved, so as to avoid the improvement measures becoming castles in the air.

Have a good performance improvement team, through direct problem solving, such as directly as PM to follow up strategy, R&D and service operation projects, build scene sense; Empower students by refining general ability, such as training more students with project management ability; Precipitate organizational capacity by establishing and continuously optimizing goal-oriented value streams and workflows and productizing them, such as designing performance platforms. In the relevant practical work, we will not only constantly encounter various challenges, but also often enjoy the joy after solving problems. Related series of articles for your reference, is for the preface, Enjoy.