What does a technical director need to know

Thoughts on the Construction of R&D Management System
- Dao: It lies in the construction of culture, thinking, norms, values, and leadership. It is thinking and ideas, which need us to implement them.
- Law: It lies in the construction of process, standardization and institutionalization, and manages the organization through the management system (rule of law).
- Technique: It is to build a personnel management system through the five dimensions of recruiting, employing, maintaining, retaining and removing.
- Instrument: It is to improve the overall engineering efficiency and fine management through systematization and instrumentation system.
- Potential: It is to establish or cater to the situation of the company and the industry, understand the strategy, and clarify the direction.

background

Technical managers (technical director/manager/CTO) expect that through the construction of a systematic management method, they can effectively build a focused, self-growth, high-efficiency R&D team in a team of more than 100 or more than 1,000 people, quickly produce results, and support the rapid development of the business.

Pain points

The rapid expansion of small team personnel, the dilution of team culture, the decline of personnel efficiency, and the gradual weakening of goals.
The management methods and standards of their respective teams are not uniform, and personnel management and coordination are gradually becoming chaotic.
After the organization expands, it is difficult to effectively pay attention to individuals, and it is impossible to accurately judge individual growth and contribution.

Target

By building a complete R&D management system and establishing a management mechanism, the technical organization can focus on the goals and operate efficiently, while motivating the team to continuously optimize and improve.

Thoughts on the Construction of R&D Management System

Think about the construction of the entire management system through the five dimensions of Tao, law, technique, device, and potential.

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Dao: It lies in the construction of culture, thinking, norms, values, and leadership. It is thinking and ideas, which need us to implement them.

Usually when the team is small, the leader can go deep into the daily management affairs, and the wisdom and ideas of the managers can be reflected in the clear and fall into the work.

And when the team size exceeds 100 people, the organizational structure is generally split into layers, each project and personnel have been focused on their own production lines, and even personnel have been distributed in every corner, and the faces of newcomers are gradually unfamiliar. At this time, we may need to build culture, thinking, basic principles, team values and leadership of managers.

Pay attention to team culture

Culture lies in the thinking of mission, vision, and values. This is also what the company needs to think about and give the organization a clear goal.

And technical managers need to have a deep understanding of the organization's mission and some social problems that need to be solved in the future; they also need to understand the real pain points of customers, strive to achieve beautiful and valuable results, and need to abide by and uphold the basic principles and purposes in the process of achieving customer goals.

The most basic job of managers is to practice these contents in person and consciously convey them to the employees who are struggling together, instead of hanging them on the wall or writing them on paper; at the same time, we will also consider adding corporate culture to performance appraisal and entry examination to strengthen team culture.

establish work rules

The principle is to clarify the most basic working principles in the process of achieving the goals of the organization. Some functional departments or specific occupational groups have their own special principles and characteristics of their work, such as some engineer cultures and ways of thinking in the technical department. We will take these as the basic working principles and unique organizational culture.

Engineer culture can include working principles such as efficiency, trustworthiness, passion, innovation, and sharing. It comes from the company's culture and includes the cultural characteristics of technical organizations. Technical managers should cater to such groups and build such teams and atmosphere.

Efficient : Get better and faster results.
Keeping promises: Willing to be responsible for the promised results.
Passion: Dedicate yourself wholeheartedly and infect others.
Innovation: Dare to subvert the existing model and produce results.
Sharing: Empower the team with experience and grow together with the team.

working thinking

Thinking lies in the way of thinking in the process of setting goals and accomplishing goals. This is very useful when establishing and formulating team or project work goals and key business decisions, such as making OCR, KPI, technology selection decisions, personnel arrangements and other scenarios. We can refer to the following ways of thinking: users first, strivers first, value orientation, and financial thinking.

User first: Find the customers that the organization or team serves, empathize with their pain points and refreshments, empower and serve users well through technology or product means, and finally reflect the value of the product or solution.
Striver priority: Managers need to identify and distinguish different types of people (mediocre, talented, talented, and striver) among team members, and leave opportunities and incentives to those who dare to take responsibility and grow together with the team. Such people will grow quickly and their potential is often amazing.
Value orientation: set goals, and do things to clarify the goals and the technical value of the thing itself, the product value and the business value that the end user can perceive. We only work on the most valuable work goals and filter out work content that cannot find value; this is a key dimension that needs to be considered in technical management decisions.
Financial thinking: the essence is cost thinking; setting goals, doing things must clarify the goals and the resource (personnel, time, etc.) input-output ratio of the thing itself. We allow strategic investment and long-term benefits, but we need to estimate, clarify and pay attention when doing things; this is also a key dimension that needs to be considered in technology management decisions.

Leadership in key positions

Leadership is a kind of influence and the ability to accomplish things; managers are not limited to managing affairs themselves, but also pay attention to people and teams, and must be people-oriented; technical managers need to master leadership, guide the team, and achieve organizational goals; they can develop their own leadership from the dimensions of "finding the right goal", "motivating the team", "influencing others", and "empathizing with others".

Identifying goals: Technical managers need to have a certain professional ability to help the team sort out a vision and set a series of goals; they can also use a certain amount of charisma to help team members discover the motivation for self-growth and set personal development goals; in essence, leaders are needed to help the team find the direction.
Motivate the team: Managers need to motivate the team to make everyone act, and motivation itself is also a big topic; we can use material incentives, honor incentives, position incentives, growth incentives and other incentives to make the team continue to succeed in small steps → positive feedback → continue to succeed → positive feedback... Such a cycle creates an atmosphere and a team that continues to win battles.
Influencing others: Leaders need to have certain foresight to guide the team (it does not have to be reflected in professional knowledge). At this time, managers need to have a certain learning ability, give guidance to the team, output their own opinions, influence others, and enhance others' cognition.
Empathy: Empathy is not necessarily a necessary quality for leaders, but it is a basic ability for managers. Managers must be able to perceive the emotions of others, the atmosphere of the team, and communicate effectively; be able to applaud the success of the team and be responsible for the failure of the team, their own decisions and related results.

summary

"Skills can still be sought without skills, and skills without skills stop at skills", which is enough to make people understand the importance of the "Tao" of management. Management is "people-oriented", the core lies in goals and incentives, and the essence is a thorough understanding of "human nature" by managers. The details and implementation of "laws", "techniques" and "tools" of management ultimately come from the understanding and implementation of the "way" of management. Therefore, some technical managers have no methodologies, and the final implementation results are not ideal. At this time, it is necessary to reflect on whether the implemented management methods are really aligned with the original intention.

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Law: It lies in the construction of process, standardization and institutionalization, and manages the organization through the management system (rule of law).

Generally speaking, when there are about 50 people in a small team, it is enough to establish a basic R&D project process to meet the daily R&D management. And when the team size exceeds one hundred or one thousand people, the R&D organization may have been split into many small teams, and the collaboration will also face the problem of remote communication. At this time, we will consider using common processes, standardized technologies, and standardized systems to deal with the challenges of large-scale technical team management.

Streamline R&D collaboration

R&D management usually involves project management and personnel management, so the management process is generally built around the project process and personnel process, and the purpose of all process-based construction is to improve R&D efficiency and reduce collaboration costs. This is also an important criterion for judging whether a thing meets the original intention of process.

Process-based construction tools: consider using collaborative tools such as DingTalk, Feishu, OA system, TAPD, etc. to customize process solutions.
Project process construction: Led by R&D PMO and other similar roles, after assisting the team leader to solve the communication, collaboration and other problems encountered in daily projects, review, coordinate abstract analysis, sort out and build a standardized process construction; such as project approval process, project iteration process, project release process, emergency handling process, R&D asset application process and other similar processes will be precipitated in this process.
Personnel process construction: Led by the research and development hrbp, in the process of assisting the team leader to solve the problems of personnel efficiency, status, growth, assessment, promotion, and elimination encountered in daily projects, review, overall planning, induction and analysis, sorting out and constructing standardized process construction; such as probationary conversion process, leave process, personnel promotion process, recruitment process, interview process, etc.

Institutionalize R&D norms

R&D management will involve project management and personnel management, and the management system will also be built around the project process and personnel process. Similarly, the purpose of all normative institutionalization is to standardize operations, have laws to follow, and reduce or avoid mistakes.

Institutionalized query tools: consider using wiki, confluence and other knowledge base-related tools.
Project system construction: lead by R&D PMO and other similar roles, in the process of assisting the team leader to solve and review daily project problems, sort out systematic solutions, consider establishing standardized operating process mechanisms such as norms and systems from the management dimension, and avoid repeated mistakes; such as database design specifications, branch management specifications, project release specifications, online fault handling specifications, network security specifications, project process specifications, test case management specifications, project performance standards and specifications, etc.
Personnel system construction: Led by R&D hrbp, in the process of assisting the team leader to solve personnel-related problems, carry out overall and systematic thinking, and cooperate with PMO and other similar roles to jointly build R&D-related human resources systems. For example, performance appraisal scoring standards, R&D promotion system, R&D recruitment system, R&D incentive system, etc.

Standardize R&D technology

In the process of building the entire R&D system, we expect to build a system through five dimensions (technical integration, business integration, monitoring integration, operation and maintenance integration, and management integration), among which the core of technology integration is to create a standardized technical system.

Technology standardization (technology integration) includes technology/framework selection standardization, technology use standardization, technology protocol/tool standardization, technology structure standardization, etc. Among them, the open source bsf framework (basic framework) solves the problems of model selection and standardization, business (business framework) solves the problems of protocol and tool standardization and technology selection compatibility, and the demo scaffolding project solves the problems of rapid construction of new projects and standardization of technical structures.

Based on the principle of technical standardization, we will also pay attention to standardization of operation and maintenance, standardization of monitoring, standardization of testing, etc., which involve the construction of standardized technology related to the entire devops.

Standardization of operation and maintenance (devops): through the construction of CICD standard automation process, automatic release through ops, so that daily releases can be handed over to development, and the workload of operation and maintenance can be completely liberated; automatic operation and maintenance can be realized by building a standardized operation and maintenance system.
Monitoring standardization: Build full-dimensional performance monitoring and quality analysis through a standardized monitoring system, and use OMS automated monitoring to make daily problem troubleshooting more intelligent, with second-level alarms, second-level service self-healing, and second-level reporting of project quality.
Test standardization: Through the standardized test management system, the main process automated test system, and the automated full-link stress test system, part of the workload of the test is liberated, and online performance and stability are guaranteed.

summary

The essence of management law is to establish the entire "management mechanism" from the dimensions of process, standardization, and institutionalization. The ultimate core goal is to establish standardized operating norms through the rule of law of management, and then improve personnel's collaboration efficiency, supervision mechanism, system stability/security, etc. through standardized norms; technical managers should not forget their original intentions when implementing, and must not manage for the sake of management. Everything should be set up with the goal of simplifying human management and improving efficiency.

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Technique: It is to build a personnel management system through the five dimensions of recruiting, employing, maintaining, retaining and removing.

Usually when the team is small, the management of personnel can be personally arranged by the core manager, so it is generally controllable. However, if the organization scale is slightly larger, the power and responsibility will inevitably be delegated, and the organization will also be split into multiple business lines or teams.

In order to ensure that the basic personnel management methods are consistent during the growth of the organization, we need to create a standard personnel management system to assist managers at all levels to ensure that suitable personnel can be identified, introduced, and cultivated, and unsuitable personnel can be eliminated; during this process, technical managers must cooperate with HRBP to build the entire personnel management system.

Create a recruitment system (recruitment)

The recruitment system is a very professional content in the process of personnel construction and management, and technical managers may pay attention to the different characteristics brought about by engineer culture, and can help improve the system construction from the dimensions of recruitment channels, personnel organization planning and budget, standardized interview process, and probation period assessment system.

Recruitment channels: It can be improved by supplementing professional recruitment channels and building incentive systems for talent introduction.

Supplementary professional recruitment channels: The common recruitment channels for technical engineers include boss, Liepin, pull hook, etc. During the selection process of recruitment channels, the characteristics of recruitment channels in vertical industries will be more obvious. High-end or some suitable positions can be recommended by headhunters or acquaintances. The success rate and matching rate will be higher in the actual operation process.

The construction of the talent introduction incentive system: It is necessary to establish and improve internal referral channels within the company, corresponding job incentive policies, explicit success stories, and touching recruitment copywriting publicity efforts in several directions to be effective.

Of course, I have seen that some companies have good incentive policies, but internal publicity and successful cases do not attract and perceive internal employees enough. I have also seen some companies include the index of the number of internal personnel recommended for interviews into the performance appraisal of each group of the technical department. The specific effect is unknown, and it can also be used as a reference.

Recruitment plan: The annual recruitment plan and financial budget can be determined from the personnel organization plan and budget.

Personnel organization planning: Technical managers need to clarify and align with the annual business direction and expectations of the higher management, and take stock of their organization's ultimate technical goals, product goals, and business goals, so as to take stock of existing technical personnel according to the goals, determine organizational job planning and corresponding recruitment plans, and coordinate with relevant HR to achieve recruitment goals.

Budget: Technical managers must have a certain financial cost thinking. After planning the personnel organization, determine the annual budget and departmental budget of the corresponding R&D organization. At the same time, they should also cooperate with HRBP to understand the organization's input-output ratio; if there are personnel changes and additional personnel added midway, they can apply for additional budgets.

Standardization of the interview process: Optimization can be promoted from multiple dimensions such as sorting out the job model, standardized interview, job competency model, interview feedback, entry process, and probation period assessment system.

Job model: Technical managers need to assist in the recruitment of hrs, and clarify the portraits of personnel for the target recruitment positions, including corresponding age requirements, ability models (technical ability requirements), levels, job responsibilities, and salary ranges. Special attention should also be paid to the ability of technical positions, the required industry business experience and mastery of business knowledge.

Standardized interview: Through a certain standardized interview process + standardized interview question bank + experience exchange, it can solve the problem that some interviewers' inconsistent interview styles lead to different interview results. However, the essence of the investigation is that the applicant's ability is multi-dimensional, and the answer is multi-solution. It requires a standardized interview and the interviewer's subjective judgment to give a relatively accurate evaluation of job matching. Therefore, the technical standard question bank is often used to verify whether the general basic ability is comprehensive, and the experience exchange is used to highlight the actual combat solving ability and evaluate the comprehensive problem-solving ideas.

Job Competency Model: To determine whether the applicant is suitable for the current job through standardized multi-dimensional and more accurate, generally consider establishing a job competency model based on job matching models such as values, age, stability, ability model, and salary. For example, for some technical jobs, if they are not management posts, there will be age requirements and restrictions; if they are not the same type of work, the technical ability requirements and assessments are different, which need to be considered when building a model.

Interview feedback: Establish a unified interview feedback, let interview participants (especially those who pass) fill in the feedback, pay attention to the interview process and interview feelings, and it is also a method to reversely screen interviewers and improve interview quality. Because the technical interview is a highly professional interview process, for example, sometimes the interviewer is not in good condition and inexperienced, the wording and answers in the communication process must be cautious, otherwise it will easily arouse the resentment of the applicants and lead to the loss of talents.

Onboarding process: According to the ranks of different positions, establishing a fast onboarding process approval and background adjustment process is a special concern for technical managers and related HR. After all, job hunting is a two-way choice. Many excellent candidates miss out because they have other opportunities during the long wait for the offer process; especially for technical workers, there are many industries and opportunities for job hunting.

Probation period assessment system: A post-entry assessment and regularization system can be established from the aspects of standardization of entry documents for newcomers, mentor system, and assessment standards during the probation period.

Standardization of entry documents for newcomers: In addition to the basic personnel system, standardize the operation and maintenance environment, software infrastructure, project process specifications, related service environments and other software environments, sort out the necessary basic information documents and development documents, and finally sort out the entry documents for newcomers, which can quickly help newcomers get started and enter the state of business development support; effectively avoid most repetitive one-to-one non-business basic information guidance, and reduce the workload of technical managers.

Mentor system: Appoint a working mentor for new recruits during the regularization period, assist them in familiarizing with the working environment, initial business familiarization plan and Q&A, formulation and achievement of assessment goals for mid-term and later transition, and resolution of teamwork difficulties during the period, etc. Many outstanding technical talents leave after the probationary period, some of which are due to inadaptation to the new environment, insufficient attention, and unclear goals, which are worthy of reflection by managers.

Trial period assessment standards: After helping newcomers to experience the initial familiarization and adaptation, generally assist newcomers to specify the work and assessment goals of the probationary period in about 2 weeks. Mentors need to assist with the difficulties and risk perceptions encountered during the guidance period, help newcomers achieve their goals and conduct assessments. The final assessment and assessment results will directly affect the probationary period.

Create an organizational system (use)

A team of about 20 to 30 people does not need to pay too much attention to team organization issues. A leader leads a few workers (maybe full-stack) to produce results directly and efficiently.

When the number of team members reaches about 50, technical managers should pay attention to and think about the issue of organizational construction. We can establish an organizational system from the two dimensions of matrix organizational structure construction and personnel echelon construction.

Matrix organizational structure construction: construct a hybrid organizational structure from the three dimensions of functional organization, product organization, and innovative organization

Matrix Organization Chart

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Functional organization: Split the organization according to the front-end, back-end, testing, product, architecture, technical committee and other functional dimensions. In a team of less than 30 people, the efficiency and reusability of personnel are relatively good, and it is also very applicable. However, the professional depth and growth of personnel and products will be limited, which is suitable for the initial stage of business exploration.

Product-oriented organization: Split multiple business project teams according to the dimension of the business field. If the team has more than 30 members, specialization can be considered. The business boundary is clear, and it focuses more on its own business value and product in-depth polishing, which is also more conducive to performance appraisal management.

Innovative organization: At the late stage of business maturity, try to focus on new business innovations. In the early stages of exploration, a small team of about 10 people is convened for rapid business verification, rapid iteration, rapid realization of value, and additional performance incentives.

In the actual development process of the technical organization, the team will constantly evolve and change the organizational structure model according to its own business characteristics and team size to cope with different forms of challenges. Generally, when there are more than 100 people, the organization will present a mixed architecture model in which functional, product, and innovative organizations coexist.

Personnel echelon construction: from the perspective of personnel type and echelon, division of responsibilities and ranks, and AB role construction

Personnel type and echelon: The technical managers in the organization need to identify mediocrity, manpower, talent, and strugglers. They must distinguish between ordinary employees, core backbones, management cadres, and reserve talents, so as to create a structured echelon of technical personnel. Generally speaking, technical leaders, product leaders, architects, and senior developers are often the most core and backbone people in the team. Similarly, in the end, all incentive systems will focus on giving priority to the head employees who have the most contribution and ability to undertake core positions. Technical managers should regularly communicate and encourage key members one-on-one, and form a mechanism specification.

Responsibility and rank division: All employees will belong to the organization, belong to the corresponding position, and define the boundaries of corresponding responsibilities, rights and abilities. This is the basis for managers to employ people. Therefore, general technical members will have a clear attribution product line, clear technical rank/management rank, clear job type and job responsibilities, which is what we often say "one carrot and one pit". However, when the company is small or innovative, the reusability of personnel is strong, there will be more work across boundaries and responsibilities, and the boundaries of responsibilities and ranks will be relatively blurred (for example, full-stack engineers), which requires trade-offs and distinctions by technical managers.

AB role building: As a manager, the most worrying thing is that personnel resignation or other changes will directly affect the achievement of organizational goals. In particular, the business scenarios of the industry are special, and the market liquidity of highly specialized technical engineers is not strong, and suitable personnel need to be cultivated for a long time. When the company reaches a certain scale or has a sufficient budget, it should be considered to establish a clear AB role system for all core positions, and cultivate and reserve talents for each other; in actual scenarios, the implementation of the AB role will indeed greatly reduce the business risks caused by personnel turnover; however, the large-scale personnel turnover caused by some industry changes, management ability problems, and major business issues still requires technical managers to think smarter.

Create a growth system (raising)

For a team of less than 30 people, the growth of the professional ability of the members is the most valuable, so it is generally considered to improve the ability from actual combat projects. Teams of more than 100 people should consider systematic construction, establish a learning and growth atmosphere, and cultivate the "waist" and "head" strengths that best meet the company's values.

We can build a growth system from the dimensions of technical capability model construction, internal sharing system construction, external communication system construction, and personnel growth budget.

Technical ability model construction: sort out clear technical rank ratings and ability requirements.

Technical organizations generally construct an overall capability model in two dimensions: P-biased technical route and M-biased management route, and then sort out company-level job requirements from the dimensions of professional ability, management ability, and business ability to create a professional technical ability model.

For recruitment, apply the ability model to benchmark the ability rating of technical personnel candidates; for the personal growth of employees, create a ability model to help individuals clarify the path and goals of personal ability growth, and motivate them to move forward.

For technical managers, through daily communication and contact with the benchmarking capability model, they can accurately understand and give management members a clear technical capability assessment.

Generally speaking, a technical organization of about 100 people can cooperate with hrbp to formulate a clear division of competencies and ranks. Small-scale technical teams rely more on the subjective judgment of managers' experience in the industry, but it is not necessary.

Construction of an internal technology sharing system (walking in): consider establishing an internal sharing incentive system, establishing a virtual technology organization, and other forms.

The core goal is to guide the team to establish a learning culture and atmosphere, and gradually form a learning technology organization.

From the perspective of internal technology sharing, we can establish a technology internal sharing system and related incentive systems. For example, some companies will have quantitative technology sharing indicators fall into the KPI assessment or full-time assessment period of each technical team, and some companies will evenly share the number of shares in individual sharing assessments or performance assessments. It is a good way to use year-end promotion reference indicators or on-site cash incentives.

It is also a good choice to establish professional virtual technology (partially functional and more detailed) organizations within the company, such as VR interest groups, React interest groups, machine learning groups, etc., to exchange professional and in-depth technical problems and the development direction of new technologies. It is also a good choice to occasionally participate in external summits together.

Construction of an external technical exchange system (going out): Consider establishing external open source communities, participating in open source communities and forum exchanges, and introducing external training and exchange resources.

Create an external open source community: It can be led by the company's technical managers, through the establishment of some hackathon projects, small open source projects, company-level technical blogs, etc., so that some core developers/developers with expertise can accumulate the pitfalls stepped on in daily projects, excellent solutions, valuable technical highlights, and interesting management insights into open technical blogs or open source project frameworks and share them with the community.

Participate in open source communities and forums: Open source community forums and some technology summits represent the latest thinking, best practices, and latest directions of top technical experts in the industry, which will greatly improve personal technical vision and ideas. Technology managers should pay attention to similar technical solutions or solutions in the same industry, use new technologies and new solutions to drive business improvement, and make their own technical solutions at the leading level in the industry. At the same time, strive to lead relevant technical personnel, actively participate in and share excellent successful cases of their own business technology, and seek technology to communicate and improve with passers-by.

Introduce external communication and training: At present, there are many consulting and technical training companies in the technology industry. Whether it is project management or new technology solutions, they have some best practice experience, new technology methodologies, and mature solutions. Technical managers can review some of the latest technical difficulties or pay attention to the latest industry solutions, invite some manufacturers, consulting service providers or high-end technical personnel to conduct some technical exchanges or purchase some related services to reduce the cost of company technology development.

Personnel growth budget: technical managers need to work together with hrbp to formulate an overall growth system plan, and provide some technical exchange funds and related incentive fees. Such as training tickets, institutional training fees, book fees, participation fees, tea talk exchange reimbursement, etc.

Incentive system (stay)

The construction of the incentive system is a very professional and in-depth part of personnel. Each company’s own business characteristics and industry characteristics, incentive methods, intensity, and employee subjects are different; regardless of the size of the company, employees need incentives, and the incentive system should not focus on negative incentives (punishment mechanisms) due to the cultural characteristics of technical engineers.

Salary system construction

Generally, the company’s salary system only has basic salary. In order to make the development of employees and the company’s development linked together, many companies now split the basic salary into monthly salary + performance + options + year-end + benefits. The salary package is also changed from monthly salary system to annual salary.

Generally speaking, about 20% of the monthly salary will be used as an additional incentive for performance (performance appraisal) and stock options (company stock value). At the end of the year, a certain percentage of fluctuation will be made according to the overall development of the company and the development of the corresponding department (department year-end bonus pool); but for technical personnel, appropriate control or reduction of the performance-based salary ratio for performance appraisal is more conducive to recruitment (some technical personnel are not willing to accept unpredictable performance-based salary, even if the personnel promise can be obtained in full in most cases).

Promote the reform of the salary system, try not to change the existing salary system, and gradually cover all employees through additional salary increases and salary adjustments for new recruits.

Construction of Departmental Incentive System

A certain size of the company will split up multiple departments. In order to gather the maximum combat effectiveness of the department, the department will be given incentives and budgets through certain money, honors, etc., and departmental incentives must give priority to material incentives.

There are many forms of departmental incentives, but they are all just presentation methods. Team activities must have funds. Technical managers should cooperate with hrbp and other roles to establish quarterly and monthly team budget standards, department incentive assessment mechanisms, and related team building plans.

Personal incentive system construction

For managers, management must be people-oriented, understand human nature, and understand the real needs of different employees. This is the key to personal motivation.

Sometimes it is not necessary to pay special attention to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Technicians are a relatively special group with a relatively high salary starting point and work content with certain creativity, so spiritual incentives may be more suitable than pure material incentives.

The motivation of an excellent engineer should come from the inner sense of accomplishment, so ideally arrange some challenging work, effectively complete and get recognized, quarterly/monthly excellent honor awards and some material encouragement, technology sharing of excellent solutions, etc. can be considered by technical managers and hrbp.

System construction of team building activities

Team building activities are a very effective activity to build team cohesion, eating, drinking and having fun is just a form. Many companies may find some professional companies to do team building activities, interspersed with many small team building activities. This form may be very good for sales occupations, but it is not the best for technical occupations.

Most of the technical professionals lack frequent oral communication due to the type of work. Most of them are introverted, calm, and focused.

Motivation comes from the satisfaction of needs

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Performance System (GO)

For a technical team of less than 30 people, it is not very meaningful to talk about performance. Managers can directly give accurate evaluations based on their usual performance.

For a team of more than 50 people, it is basically necessary to start considering performance appraisal and building a comprehensive personnel optimization mechanism; in essence, through systematic construction, the survival of the fittest will be eliminated, so that the outstanding top-notch personnel will be promoted and the bottom incompetent personnel will be eliminated; through the construction of contribution model, promotion system, energy efficiency model, performance appraisal system, personnel elimination mechanism and other dimensions to build a performance system.

Contribute to model building

The contribution model (reviewing the work process) refers to the dimensional indicator model of the overall work process contribution made by an individual or team for the organization. The core assessment is the quantifiable process of work (workload, quality, result), which is an important reference index for human resources and technical managers to evaluate employee output.

For technicians, the number of projects they participated in, the number of project iterations they participated in, the number of submitted tasks, the number of bugs that occurred, the number of major failures, the number of sharing times, code quality, value achievement (technical value, business value, product value), 360-degree evaluation results, superior evaluation results, etc. can be used as some indicator sources for the contribution model, and the final quantitative evaluation of personal ability scores; for technical managers, the comprehensive average score of direct subordinates is their comprehensive ability score.

Construction of promotion system

Generally speaking, the company has a designated promotion time window every year, and technical personnel apply for promotion or salary increase opportunities according to their own wishes or the nomination of superior supervisors.

Technical managers need to cooperate with hrbp to build a promotion system and process. According to the promotion personnel's ability model, contribution model, energy efficiency model, performance assessment results (including value assessment), automatic evaluation and reference are given, and then the promotion results are finally evaluated according to the promotion personnel's interview results, wishes and personal future growth plans.

Application for promotion in special scenarios requires additional special procedures for approval and assessment mechanisms (such as consideration of personnel turnover and exceptional promotion).

Energy Efficiency Model Construction

The energy efficiency index is the input-output ratio, which is also an important reference index to measure the healthy working status of the organization.

For the company, it is the daily work of hrbp to regularly evaluate the energy efficiency of the organization/team, so as to identify organizational problems in a timely manner.

For technical work teams, the creativity and complexity of work content (unlike quantifiable results in traditional industries) is the essential factor that makes it difficult to quantify the implementation of organizational energy efficiency assessment.

The resource-based evaluation model can be used as one of the feasible evaluation reference methods. The output value of the organization/individual is evaluated by sorting out the contribution model of the organization/individual, and then the input value is evaluated by the assets and costs of the organization/individual. Finally, the input-output ratio is quantified; the construction of an energy efficiency model is a relatively large topic, and the specific practical effect still needs to be explored and verified.

Performance appraisal system construction

Performance appraisal (examination of work results) refers to an indicator quantification model of the final result completion degree of an individual or a team to formulate and achieve goals.

The contribution model focuses on the details of the goal achievement process and can be used as a problem tracing and reference indicator; the performance assessment focuses on the goal achievement results and can be used as an important incentive indicator.

Technical managers not only motivate results, but also reward those who excel in the process. Performance appraisal should include value assessment and goal achievement assessment, including personal self-assessment assessment and direct supervisor assessment; if there is a large difference between self-assessment and supervisor assessment results, hrbp and direct supervisor should have a timely interview to help assessors understand target expectations and differences; assessment index results directly affect performance incentives, but do not affect year-end incentives.

Personnel elimination mechanism construction

The personnel elimination mechanism is a way to continuously optimize the team's capabilities. Letting unsuitable people leave or demote the team is the greatest responsibility for the team and the company. However, how to define "inappropriate" requires technical managers to cooperate with HRBP to establish standard systems and rules to identify them.

Generally speaking, according to the company's basic system regulations, performance appraisal, and executive elimination rights, personnel are eliminated or downgraded. For example, serious violations such as violating the basic confidentiality agreement will be directly eliminated at the company level; employees whose performance appraisal exceeds two consecutive times are unqualified, the direct supervisor and HRBP will interview and help, and then make a decision according to the situation;

summary

The success of an excellent company often includes the success of excellent talents plus the organization. The art of management is dedicated to building the entire talent system and motivating excellent people to eventually lead the organization to success.

However, the management of people is complicated, because everyone's demands and expectations are different, and managers need to have a thorough understanding of human nature. In particular, technical managers must understand that the art of management is a means after all. Only by understanding the culture of engineers and truly entering the hearts of technical personnel can they be effectively motivated. We encourage each other.

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Instrument: It is to improve the overall engineering efficiency and fine management through systematization and instrumentation system.

Since the development of society (agriculture, industry, modernization), the improvement of production capacity essentially comes from the improvement of tools. Regardless of the size of the team, tools can significantly improve R&D efficiency, and in some scenarios it may bring about a 5-fold or 10-fold improvement.

Therefore, technical managers must pay attention to some of the latest and best practices in the technology industry, and evaluate and try some platforms or tools accumulated by these practices to empower the entire technical team.

In practice, we build a R&D system from five dimensions (technology integration, business integration, monitoring integration, operation and maintenance integration, and management integration), and constantly introduce some third-party tools/platforms/open source/ideas, and self-developed some tools or frameworks to improve the overall R&D experience and efficiency.

cloud platform

The advantage of the cloud platform is that it can be used on demand, which is simple and convenient. For small entrepreneurial companies, they can quickly develop and go online to verify the business model, reducing the heavy workload of IT operation and maintenance.

Of course, in principle, the scale of the cloud platform will bring about cost reduction, but this is not the case in reality. After a certain scale, you can properly consider the scenario and cost to build your own server or build a hybrid cloud. Consider Tencent Cloud and Alibaba Cloud in China; AWS and Google Cloud in foreign countries. When cooperating with third-party cloud vendors, you can talk about discounts, and strive for 20% off and 50% off.

cloud native

Kubernetes is the best practice cloud-native tool; in practice, the server resources brought by cloud-native are reduced by about 30%, especially for development, testing, and pre-release environments, where there are not many users and frequent users. The resource reuse and utilization rate brought by cloud-native are still very high, and the cost reduction will also be obvious.

Cloud native is not only a transformation of services, but also considers all cloud nativeization in infrastructure, which can effectively improve the efficiency of operation and maintenance and standardize the practice.

Devops

There are many devops business solutions on the market, some of which are compatible or combined with cloud native and their respective cloud platforms. But it is a pity that the solution is more in-depth, and it is more closely integrated with some of its own solutions, but the versatility is reduced, and what we need is more pluggable customization.

The self-developed ops automated operation and maintenance platform, combined with the customized standardized cicd method, is actually more suitable for its own scenario (in addition to supporting other solutions), but this is not a silver bullet solution. The essential purpose is to simplify operation and maintenance and simplify release.

Enterprise collaborative office communication tool

There are many tools for enterprise collaborative office on the market, and most of them are free. For example, Enterprise WeChat, DingTalk, and Feishu. From the experience of using all collaborative software, I personally prefer DingTalk. Of course, Feishu is also okay, and Qiwei is the least favorite. Enterprise collaborative office tools determine the communication efficiency of distributed remote office and remote office, and the efficiency is improved several times; however, small team members generally do not feel the same office area, and the difference is not obvious.

Self-developed standardization framework

The technology selection will basically consider popular languages and mainstream technologies. After all, there will be more such talents, such as java. The activity of the open source community, the maturity and activity of the solution are also considered, such as the spring framework system. The integration of some unique technical standards and technical tools, such as the self-developed bsf framework, business business framework, and scaffolding, can help developers quickly get started in one minute and enter development, and the energy efficiency improvement is very obvious.

Self-developed efficiency platform

Ali, Tencent, Baidu and other companies are all developing performance platforms, hoping to improve the input-output ratio of personnel in the entire link of research and development.

Similarly, we also expect to have a simple and effective platform, which can deposit the company's culture, management philosophy, system, R&D management process, etc. into such a platform, and can provide real-time feedback to find out the efficiency problems of personnel, projects, and organizations, and think about and improve them in a timely manner.

This is also what the integration of the R&D system management needs to do, to standardize and streamline management matters;

Self-developed monitoring platform pms

The monitoring platform is the last line of defense for the stability of the entire technology platform and business platform, and the fastest way to find and solve problems depends on the construction of a systematic monitoring platform.

Many third parties also provide commercial or free, open source monitoring solutions, such as Tingyun, skywalking, cat, etc. Most of the solutions cannot actually meet the needs, such as some custom middleware, components, and standardized technical solutions. We need to implant our own monitoring, and some business monitoring and embedding points may require dynamic configuration. At the same time, some unique alarms and related monitoring strategies and code quality conditions need to be included in the monitoring system construction. In the end, the company needs to sort out a set of monitoring standards and experience based on business scenarios and management specifications to help classify problems, find problems in time, guide and solve problems, and even self-healing services.

Self-developed full-link stress testing platform

If there are performance requirements for the company's business and performance indicators are used as daily technical standards and online standards, we may need a full-link stress testing platform to automatically generate daily performance reports and performance predictions at regular intervals. It will involve the recording and accurate playback of traffic and the generation of stress test reports, and finally make the stress test fully automated, liberating the energy and repetitive work of the testers.

third party tools

There are many best project management practices in the industry, and many managers have relevant new and tool accumulation, which is a great reference for other technical managers. For example, tapd, worktile, etc. can be used, but it should be combined with the actual situation of the company and the focus of management.

summary

What the manager introduces is the performance improvement given by tools and automation practices, thus detonating the entire technical productivity. However, managers must know that tools are tools after all, and it is still people who can really bring about change.

Even if different people can bring different results to the same tool, then different management methods lead different people to use the same tool, and the final results and effectiveness may be completely different. Therefore, technical managers need to be vigilant, people and management are the core of long-term attention, and the ultimate tool can bring explosive improvement.

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Potential: It is to establish or cater to the situation of the company and the industry, understand the strategy, and clarify the direction.

There are many opportunities in this era, and the overall business situation and technological situation are constantly changing. The era of simply building a product behind closed doors has passed.

This requires technology managers to be sensitive enough to their own industry and business situations, to be sensitive enough to technology updates and iterations, and to plan ahead. Therefore, technology managers need to grasp or establish changes in internal and external trends.

External situation refers to the situation of the external industry and the situation of business

A few years ago, with the rapid development of the Internet, many industries were at the forefront of the industry. Lei Jun said a sentence: "Standing on the outlet, pigs can fly." This sentence is to explain that the essence of entrepreneurial success is to find the outlet and follow the trend; it originated from "Sun Tzu's Art of War: Military Potential Chapter", "Thus, the momentum of a person who is good at fighting is like turning a round stone on a mountain of thousands of feet, and the momentum" means that the "momentum" created by people who are good at commanding war is like letting a round stone roll down from a very high and steep mountain. ferocious.

And technical managers need to perceive and understand the overall industry situation, and cooperate with the company's strategy as soon as possible to make timely business adjustments. In particular, changes in the technical field, such as natural language processing, artificial intelligence, deep learning and other new technology fields that can give business empowerment and innovation, are also very valuable and worth trying. Some best practices in the industry and mature third-party business solutions (such as Blue Whale, Tingyun, Jiguang, etc.) can be contacted and evaluated in depth, and the reusability of these technologies can be considered to reduce the cost of self-development.

Internal momentum is the basis and necessary condition for establishing internal success (momentum building)

To promote the implementation and implementation of some goals, we must consider various factors such as time, location, and harmony of people. Timing refers to whether the timing of doing things is appropriate, location refers to whether the resource conditions for success are available, and harmony of people refers to the cohesion and mentality of the team.

The core work content of an excellent technical manager is to establish internal conditions for success (momentum) based on goals, help team members identify real high-value pain points in a bunch of affairs, gather superior resources to create conditions, and advance and solve them.

For example, the implementation of some technological changes and standardization can be reviewed based on current failures (some major service unavailability failures) and problems (identify pain points and single-point breakthroughs), sort out systematic solutions, and find high-tech Ps for gradual planning and implementation.

summary

The trend of management is to let managers jump out of the business execution itself, and see clearly the main reasons for the success or failure of things from the overall situation. Whether it is the company's strategy or the advancement of internal affairs, managers need to be able to think deeply about the essence and make the best use of the situation.

Then managers still need to be vigilant. Although the situation can bring amplitude and opportunities, outstanding products and achievements are the real strength to lead the company and organization. Therefore, the key to success still comes from the excellent talents of the organization and the executive power of the team, so that products and achievements can be finally produced.

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Summarize

The construction of the R&D management system does not have a complete best practice that can be directly reused, just as there is no such organization and mental experience in the world, so technical managers need to accumulate some framework methodologies of their own through continuous understanding to cope with the challenges that the company will face in the future. We still need to learn, refresh, accumulate, share, communicate, and forge ahead with fellow travelers!

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Copyright statement: This article is an original article of CSDN blogger "Che Jiangyi", following the CC 4.0 BY-SA copyright agreement, please attach the original source link and this statement for reprinting.
Original link: https://blog.csdn.net/fengyeguigui/article/details/125338553