In software development projects, improving the efficiency of project management and building an efficient team are issues that technical managers need to keep thinking about. Mr. Bin Feng, CTO and co-founder of ONES, was invited to participate in the live broadcast of the open class “CTO: The Cultivation of Technical Managers”, and shared the efficient project management methods of technical managers with everyone. From three aspects of management cognition, goal and practice, he discusses how technical managers break the thinking inertia and lead the team to improve project management efficiency and team productivity.

Correct perception: Managers deliver value through teams

What is management? Management is mobilizing resources to achieve goals. In a team, to achieve a big goal, it is not enough to rely on individual strength, must rely on team cooperation, there is a team management.

Good management first needs to establish correct management cognition, but managers often fall into four mistakes:

  • Myth 1: Managers are front-line engineers
  • Myth 2: After doing management, you feel unproductive
  • Mistake three: first have management authority to begin to manage the work
  • Misconception four: if the subordinate’s technical ability is stronger than me, I am afraid that I can not control

Managers are often promoted from excellent performers, and their work style needs to be adjusted to correctly understand their own value. Engineers output results by themselves, while managers produce value through the team. Output of managers = output of the department under their jurisdiction + output that indirectly affects the department. The most important task of a management team is not to lead a division and crush the skills of its subordinates, but to set goals, coordinate resources and mobilize the team to move toward those goals. So how do you achieve your goals effectively?

Understand business goals and build high performance teams

In order to build an efficient R&D team, it should not only improve the level of professional technical ability, but also support the business goals of the team. To this end, managers need to help team members correctly understand business objectives, separate technical objectives, and ensure the alignment of objectives among team members and agile execution through continuous communication.

The formulation of team goals requires focus, choose one from nine and do the most cost-effective thing first. In r&d practice, managers need to constantly check the status of the project and guide the team to ensure that the team is always moving towards the same goal. At the same time, 5W2H seven-question analysis method was adopted to keep comprehensive thinking, orderly advance the project and control the project cost.

Business + team + self-growth, practice and efficient research and development

1 managers do things wisely

Research and development management is a complex process, there will always be a variety of problems, good management decisions can help the team to meet the challenges. Managers can listen to the opinions of the majority, discuss with the minority, and then make their own decisions, which can not only avoid missing blind spots of information, but also improve the efficiency of decision-making. To be a good technical manager, you often need to have the ability to “think across levels”, not only from the perspective of technical management, but also from the perspective of your boss, or even your boss’s boss to consider the long-term goals of the team.

2. Selection, use, education and retention of the team

Establishing and cultivating correct team values is the first step to achieve team efficiency. Managers need to always emphasize goals, let the team know what they are fighting for, and gather team strength. Managers also need to have the courage to replace members whose values are inconsistent. In order to create a good collaborative environment for the team, management tools can be introduced to digitize the daily work of the team, integrate work flow, share progress, statistical analysis and precipitation knowledge, so as to improve the team work efficiency. In project review, managers need to pay more attention to end-to-end data, quantify and analyze efficiency indicators in each link of R&D, find the root cause of low efficiency, and help the team process improvement. Activating team innovation is also one of the tasks of managers. The manager should serve as the escort of trial and error of the team, allowing members to boldly try within a controllable range, stimulating the potential of the team and promoting the growth of the team.

Keep, break and leave, managers also want to grow

“Guarding” requires managers to keep learning and arming themselves. Through books, courses, forums and other channels, we can easily learn the experience and knowledge summarized by predecessors, and even find solutions to current problems. In terms of technical ability, managers should make good technical depth in the early stage, maintain technical vision and assist in technical decision-making. Only with the foundation of “guarding”, can we further innovate and move towards a new system, that is, to achieve “breaking” and “leaving”. Managers also need to continue to grow, be good at obtaining and giving feedback, and constantly improve themselves in the feedback cycle.

To sum up, the efficiency of r&d team should not stop at the technical level. Managers should lead the team to correctly understand, focus on and execute business goals efficiently. At the same time, we use software tools to standardize the workflow, improve team efficiency with automation, quantify the team and ourselves, and continue to improve.

ONES provides professional R & D management solutions for enterprises, covering the whole process of R & D management, realizing the communication between R & D data and engineering data, creating a good collaborative environment for managers, products, R & D, testing, operation and maintenance and other team roles, improving team work efficiency and ensuring the continuous and stable delivery of products.

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