Let the Software Company Manage a little more "soul" (reprinted)

Its management is likely to be in trouble.

What is the soul of management?

If Peter Drucker says that management is right in practice, the soul of management must be a spirit of independent thinking, because only independent thinking can complete the theory and reality, complete special to general, generally to special such a cycle.

What if management lacks a soul?

This will lead to the loss of a kind of self-reflection spirit, and the sharing of successful experiences will become everywhere, but in fact the management issues continue.

When a giant such as Kodak falls down, people often think about it as a management problem. However, when it is still there, people often think that management supports its survival, but it cannot identify its management failure. It is likely that it is leading to the corruption of the body.

The success of many companies is due to the product and demographic dividend.

Management is such a thing. Everyone can say a few words, but it is hard for you to identify whether this is correct or wrong, it is difficult to identify whether it is a positive boosting or a reverse lethal effect on the company's success. The success of many companies is more due to the window period. Because of the product and demographic dividend, it is usually not because of management, or even because management actually brings negative values, it's just because other aspects are too large, or the arrogance of success is offset.

If management loses its soul, it will still feel better when the problem grows. Instead, it will miss a chance to deeply understand the problem, think about the nature and solution of the problem, and try to solve the problem. Next we will discuss what the problem is, what the essential cause is, and how to solve this kind of thinking to further explain what the management should look like if there is a soul.

Many software companies are in trouble due to lack of "soul" Management

In reality, the management of many software companies is likely to be in trouble.

This dilemma originated from the following basic facts:

 

1. The rapid expansion of knowledge and rapid changes in the market environment lead to the inversion of work control. The person on the scene is better than his superiors.
2. The organizational structure must be a pyramid structure, which further requires the superior to evaluate the subordinate performance.
3. The characteristics of software make the outputs related to it unable to be accurately measured.
4. Pure market results are relatively objective and convincing, but require a long reflection. The results cover a wide range and are more suitable for measuring high-level performance than individual performance.

 

In the face of such basic reality, if we think independently and analyze it carefully, we can find more things:

The third reason is that the evaluation must depend on judgment, rather than code line productivity, and the bug rate is a digital indicator. The first and second cases make the judgment difficult and the results hard to be universally convinced. This is a dilemma. The more clarity we know, the less political influence the company has, for example, sales and sales. The more vague the information is, the heavier the governance atmosphere. Judgment only belongs to people, but people are relatively subjective. Therefore, subjective factors must be included in any judgment result. Once the organization grows and the number of stakeholders increases, the judgment process is more vulnerable to irrational factors.

The key danger of this dilemma lies in that he will make justice virtualized and personalized. The cognitive difference between the evaluators and the evaluators will lead everyone to feel that they have not been given a fair treatment, further development is a serious departure between personal wishes and organizational goals.

It is like a chronic poison. The longer a company has to survive, the more likely it is to breed factions and politics. The more influential the faction and politics will be, the more likely it will be to judge itself. On the contrary, small companies are more likely to circumvent the negative effects they may bring. Depending on the moral character and vision of a person or a few people, it is easier for small companies to maintain universally recognized justice. However, for a job, such as management, if the result is mainly dependent on an individual or a coincidence, the case may be resolved, but it does not help to change the fact that the job itself is already in trouble.

 

• As this dilemma deepens, various negative phenomena will emerge one after another, such:
• Everyone is in a defensive status, and it takes a lot of time to analyze and prove that it should not be done by me.
• I tried to prove that this had nothing to do with me, but I did not seriously consider how to solve and prevent the problem. The summary analysis became a pass-through.
• Complain about franchise more than effort.
• ......

 

If the management client is truly independent, and carefully analyzed, it will not often share the successful experience, but will think more about how to solve it, so it will come to the essence of the problem:

The following describes the relationship between organizational forces and individuals based on the sum of parts and the premise. This formula comes from perfect software development: Methods and logic:

Assume that one's engineering literacy is E, and one's willingness to work is W. The basic strength of the Organization is O, and the internal friction coefficient is M. For an organization with N people, from a pure volume perspective, the final contribution per unit time can be expressed:
[(E1 * W1 + O) + (e2 * W2 + O) +... + (enwn + O)] * m

Through such decomposition, we can find that the willingness to work, the foundation provided by the Organization platform, the internal friction coefficient, and personal ability can all be the key factors affecting organizational efficiency, however, in the long term, the most fundamental thing is willingness to work. If the willingness to work can be maintained on a long timeline, other projects will always have a better trend. Otherwise, other factors will become worse.

The core support of willingness to work is first justice, which aims at the imbalance between the income and the self-fulfillment level. The dilemmas mentioned above have a gradual corrosive effect on the foundation of justice. (See the fairness theory in organizational behavior .)

What can we do to keep management from losing its soul?

The answer may not be the above, but after recognizing these essential problems, we will try our best to find a solution. We can refer to the existing methodology in the software field first, agile and cmme are both close methodologies related to management, but you may be shocked to find that they are useful but do not actually solve the key part of the above problem. Further Thinking may find your own methods, such:

No matter how important resources and cash flows are, management is human management first. The higher the weight of knowledge, the more important people are. People themselves are first embodied in a relationship. In this relationship, through collaboration with others, people start to assume various roles. In the workplace, roles can be represented as programmers, architects, CTO, designers.

This, in turn, means that all people associated with a person can objectively and fairly evaluate the person, because this person has completed his/her role in collaboration with the people around him. In this way, the ultimate goal of performance appraisal is to discover the evaluation in association.

This seems a little abstract, but we can use some analogy to make things clearer. Programmers should be familiar with the stackoverflow website. After using it for a long time, you will find that the vote on this website expresses the value of an answer or even a question objectively and accurately. The key means to achieve this goal are surprisingly simple: voting for specific results.

The main link between people in stackoverflow is question and answer. When a initiates an answer, all persons who see the answer are associated with a, and the voting result is a comment of all related persons on a's work.

If we promote similar scenarios to our work, we can find that there is no essential difference between the relationship between people in the work and the relationship between people in stackoverflow and those in stackoverflow. In most cases, people in the workplace also need to collaborate based on specific results, and a person's work results also affect A, B, and C.

This, in turn, means that as long as the voting mechanism similar to stackoverflow can be established in general, and if the affiliates also actively vote, it is possible to establish a very objective evaluation system.

The philosophy behind this is very simple: when all the people who use the result of a give feedback to it, the result is fair and objective.

Some may think of 360-Degree performance appraisal. However, the two are actually different. The key point here is that we should emphasize the continuous voting on the outcome things, and finally summarize the comments on things to people. Rather than directly evaluating people, directly evaluating people will always lead to more subjective opinions.

Such an evaluation system can also be transplanted to work.

Such mechanisms may be transplanted to work: All Deliverables can be authenticated and anonymous voting (for short-term tasks, it may be necessary to restrict stakeholders ). The number of eventually recognized results can basically be equivalent to the performance of a person in a specified outcome.

To enable such a system to run, we need to further clarify the responsibility boundaries between the company and the individual. In fact, this is equivalent to making people involved in this system become athletes, while the company plays the role of rule makers and referees.

 

• The company is responsible for formulating rules and maintaining rules, such:
• Each person must generate a specified number of votes within a specified period of time.
• Non-validators cannot vote. Of course, the verification is not necessarily a real name.
• In total, a certain number of votes can be obtained, for example, 10 votes.
• Ensure that only persons associated with work can vote.
• ......

 

At the same time, to ensure that the voting does not violate the basic rules:

 

• Check whether there are no associated votes.
• Whether a ticket is maliciously canvassing.
• ......

 

Personal responsibilities are simple. You only need to vote publicly.

Conclusion

It is terrible to say that, under this rapid feedback system, the ultimate objective degree only depends on the degree of public opinions. This is not a defect of this method, but a defect of people, but it does affect the results of this method. This makes it difficult to extend this method to the whole society, but it has a narrow application boundary, but it should be able to solve various problems in software companies. Because various products in software companies are naturally digitalized, they are easy to publicize and track.

Such a system does not need to be extremely accurate. As long as it reaches stackoverflow or GitHub, it can become a very useful system. It may initially be influenced by corporate culture, but in the long term it can shape a benign corporate culture.

If you think about this step, you need to make some specific attempts and learn from the practice to improve your own ideas. It is not necessarily true. You may need to discard it and start a new stove. However, if you have gone through such a step, you may not lose your soul in management, I will share it with you. "This story is much more interesting.

Introduction:Li Zhiyong, initiator of V public investment, and author of perfect software development: Methods and logic. Currently, the programmer's law of survival is being released for free. Weibo: Li Zhiyong Sz and vfacebook.