Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

On the weekend, it was April Fool's Day, and some people in the group were working overtime. I remembered that during the last training break, I discussed the question of "Agile Development overtime?". Although it was not selected as an after-class vote, I would like to give you a complete answer here.

problem

Do you work overtime in agile development?

Someone downstairs asked "what is the relationship between agility and overtime", adding these two sentences.

Some programmers think that agile development institutionally requires no overtime (sustainable pace), so they will say, "Boss, now you are pushing agile development, so we can't work overtime, because agile development can't work overtime." The result must be: "Agile should be agile, and you should continue to work overtime."

"what exists is reasonable". Since overtime is at least purposeful or advantageous, if you want to abolish overtime, you must find something more reasonable than overtime and let it take its place instead of contradicting the system.

What is "it"?

Analysis.

If you say there is no overtime, how can you make up for the productivity generated by overtime now?

When it comes to overtime, how do you understand the phrase "sustainable pace" in Agile 12 principles?

Before we solve this problem, let's see why we work overtime.

"overtime is due to lack of productivity."

This is the most common understanding, in addition to overtime, there is also a recruitment, recruitment + overtime, to solve the productivity problem.

However, why do some companies, with a large number of people, work overtime every day, but face bankruptcy?

Miraculously, before the bankruptcy, there will be layoffs, reducing productivity again; and layoffs are often affirmed, such as when listed companies lay off staff, share prices generally rise (of course, they must have fallen before).

What is the relationship between falling productivity and rising stock prices? Why is there an obvious contradiction between the two?

There is an answer to all this in agile development, but not very directly, because the people who invented agile development don't care about the stock price.

"working overtime is because there are too many things to do."

The rise and fall of Nokia is a stark example.

When Nokia was at its lowest point 20 years ago, it was impossible for everyone to work overtime in its heyday. Why? Because at that time Nokia was engaged in pulp, chemical industry, household appliances and furniture. And so on countless industries, each is reluctant to let go.

Nokia's rise began after it began to abandon hundreds of businesses and concentrate on the telecommunications sector. Nokia's decline began after it used hundreds of products in the telecommunications field.

Simply "owning hundreds of industries or products" will not directly lead to the decline of enterprises, but it will lead to bloated enterprises, reduced professionalism, decision-makers can not understand different industries, and then lead to the decline of decision-making efficiency and market perception. eventually lead to the decline of enterprises.

Finally, simply understand this point of view in two sentences:

Google can't do overtime what MS does in Windows, and Apple can't do overtime what Nokia does in mobile phone.

Scheme

The front is easier to do and the latter is more thorough.

Option 1

For project managers, no matter whether they are working overtime or not, and whether they have the ability to solve the current situation of "overtime or not", they have to think about a question: is overtime development important now? Where did they come from?

Most of the time, we feel that the overtime work and overtime itself are external requirements, and there is nothing we can do, but in fact, we may not do some things well, such as:

1. In the past, in order to meet the requirements of the leadership and scramble for progress, resulting in poor quality, had to work overtime.

two。 As a result of preoccupied with development and do not care about the business, causing the product manager to explain the business more and more after a lot of rework, resulting in overtime …...

3. Because I don't care whether the product manager has sorted the requirements or not, I find that there are a lot of secondary functions, and the important ones haven't been done yet, which leads to overtime.

……

The main reason for the above problems is that there is a "them" outside "us", either leaders, product managers, or sales. In short, because "they are not doing their job well", we work overtime.

To solve this problem, we need to be quite open and try to help them point out the problem with their mindset.

This is difficult, but in part 3 (see catalog), we mentioned that do not think that others are unreasonable, unwise, and do not accept help, the most important thing is to take the first step carefully.

Option 2

The product manager should really understand the core value of the product.

After many "new products" succeed, they will find that it is only some small functions that lead to their success, such as QQ,Google, Baidu and Iphone.

If a product manager insists that "our functions are all better than our competitors" in order to succeed, then the product manager is worthless, because a fool can make that judgment.

Good product managers are those who know and can say why some few features are more important.

A case of interviewing a marketing manager (http://cheny.blog.51cto.com/3988930/1100384) was mentioned before, and the general view of that marketing manager is that "as long as we invest enough money into the marketing work, our marketing work can / can be done well", which is also undesirable.

The above two are the places where agile development is most likely to perform, and the most direct way to avoid overtime is to deliver core customer value, rather than delivering features that surpass competitors.

When the product manager wants to suggest to the boss that the development team work overtime, he must ask himself, "are all these features necessary?" Because for mental work, overtime only produces a productivity increase of no more than 20%, and it is easy to find 20% junk function in the product.

Option 3

For the product director, it is necessary to understand the most urgent problems in the industry, seek user breakthroughs, and plan the product line.

The most important thing in the industry is the user, not the individual function.

At the beginning of doing the Internet, people are doing "portals", because portals are all-inclusive, whose portals are big, whose users seem to be more.

But up to now, international and domestic portals have declined, and those that still exist, the main business is no longer the portal itself.

Foreign all-inclusive Yahoo and AOL have declined, domestic NetEase and Sohu are playing games (more than 70% of their income), Sina is playing xxx and Weibo, Tencent. Without QQ,QQ.com, it's nothing.

"Portal" is actually an all-inclusive product line, why doesn't it work? Because no matter playing games, making friends, checking information. These seem to be able to do in the portal, there are better and more direct places, and eventually people left the portal, where to go.

Therefore, if a product director advocates a complete product line, as many products as possible, etc., to a large extent, it shows that he is not sure which product is the future direction, so he has to expand without principle.

Isn't it good to reap a wide range of crops and a small harvest? not good.

There is a "negative eye" in go, that is, if a piece of chess is not in good shape, the enemy will surround its own space in the game, and this kind of chess will even be judged as a negative number when counting the number of items (that is, the space occupied).

The surplus products are not only unprofitable, but also disperse the development strength, funds and resources, and increase the management cost. Due to the characteristics of "weightless economy" in the Internet era, most products on the market can only survive the first few, and all the surplus products are negative equity.

When we visited a game company 08 years ago, we learned that they had a research and development team of 600 people (big at that time, surpassing Jinshan and Sohu). At the same time, they were developing 40 kinds of games, and when they came out, they exchanged views with industry sales. I feel that an average of 15 people are invested in a game, and most of them are MMORPG. I'm afraid they can't make any good games, and it's impossible to work overtime. As a matter of fact, this is really the case. In 2010, the company experienced a lot of staff loss, and up to now, there are no good games that can be named on the market. With the amount of their research and development and the amount of money, it is not difficult to focus on conquering a small number of products.

You might say, "it's too hard to find someone who can make such a judgment." But after all, a company only needs one or two, instead of using such a huge amount of human and financial resources to grow widely, it is better to find and train such a person, or some people. And in fact, there are not two kinds of people in the world who "can do it" and "cannot do it". Most enterprises in trouble belong to a state of "collective unconsciousness"; if enterprises consciously do so, they will find that there are a lot of people with overall vision and vision in their own enterprises.

Option 4

This is one of the top-level layout problems, which is to reduce the industry and build an industry advantage.

Both Nokia and Samsung did it at that time, that is, to concentrate their forces and occupy the advantage of some small industries. At that time, both companies were versatile and half-dead, and both became world-class enterprises after the reduction of the industry.

In fact, there are countless large companies in the world, if we list the products of each company, we will find that there are not many companies that can name two, and almost none of them have three or five. In other words, most of these companies dominate the world with one or two products.

Option 5

It is also a problem of layout: the strategy of divide and conquer.

Samsung is a strange company. It is one of the few companies that can thrive in multiple industries.

Although Samsung has cut a lot of redundant industries, Samsung is still engaged in a number of traditional industries today, but they have adopted a divide-and-conquer strategy, that is, they do their own things, think about their own problems and gain their own interests.

Although the total market capitalization of Samsung Group is very high, there is still a gap compared with the peak of Nokia and Microsoft that year. In other words, under the huge volume, they still adopt centralized management, and the problems emerge one after another.

For example, it is inevitable that there will be problems in the need for senior executives who come from a stand-alone operating system to make decisions on MSN issues in the Internet era, and for senior executives who come from analog circuits to make decisions on smart tablets.

Apple and Google adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy, which is a win-win Store strategy with developers, leaving developers to decide what they should develop and what they should look like.

4 and 5 are written briefly because it doesn't have much to do with agile development, but it has a lot to do with overtime.

If you are in line with your own ideas and want to know more about the analysis, please follow a planned series called "Business Ethics in the Internet Age" in the next six months. It will analyze the new ethical relationships that are emerging between the company's employees and bosses / production departments and sales departments / producers and users / producers and partners / producers and competitors in the past 10 to the next 20 years.

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