Programmer magazine: How small companies build technical middle layers

Programmer magazine: How small companies build middle-level technology

Literally, the CTO (Chief Technology Officer, Chief Technology Officer) has three meanings. First, the scope of work is the technical department; second, the nature of work is the manager of the technical department; and finally the top manager of the technical department. From these three levels, we can clarify the main responsibilities of CTO: to manage middle-level managers in the Technical Department to meet the management needs of the technical department. Therefore, the CTO should avoid Several misunderstandings, such as taking the lead inside the company, rather than taking the lead outside the company to carry out technical work. Outsourcing is the responsibility of the CIO. By cultivating middle-level managers to meet work requirements, rather than recruiting external experts to solve work problems, recruiting is HR's responsibility. Reserve a proper number of redundant personnel to avoid employee mobility risks, rather than increasing risks while reducing staff and reducing costs, it is the responsibility of the CEO to balance the company's risks and costs. When the CTO no longer falls into the above misunderstanding, it will choose to build a technical team by cultivating middle-level managers. The middle-level managers are the "backbone" of the technical department and the "template" of new employees ", it is the subject of "agile" work. This article attempts to analyze the work characteristics of the technical department of a small company, puts forward some suggestions on the middle-Layer Construction Technology to the CTO of the small company, and shares some successful CTO experience.

Valuable people are not "backbone"

If CTO is the "brain" of the technical department, the middle-level managers are the "backbone" of the technical department ". CTO's work is inseparable from "backbone", because CTO often mistakenly believes that valuable people are "backbone ".

External "experts" will not be "backbone ". Most ctos first become technical masters and then promoted to CTO. Therefore, CTO often has an inertia of thinking that the value of technical departments comes from "Masters ", therefore, after taking charge of the technical department, it will take considerable time and cost to recruit "experts" and to stabilize the "Masters" who have already arrived ". However, in practice, we will find that the results are often unsatisfactory. The number of "masters" is relatively small, and there are still a large number of IT companies that lack candidates for CTO competency. Therefore, "masters" from "Digging" will often be "dug. Therefore, CTO should try its best to use temporary employment for "experts.

"Unstable" is difficult to cultivate as "backbone ". At present, the mobility of IT talents is significantly higher than that of other industries. In small and medium enterprises, the annual turnover rate often exceeds 30%. Therefore, IT departments need a certain number of redundant personnel to avoid the troubles caused by resignation. For grass-roots team members, redundant staff can alleviate the troubles caused by employee resignation. for team leaders, each team lead is responsible for some work and cannot directly replace each other, therefore, after the team leader leaves, the team lead is usually promoted among the members of the group. At this time, the work of the entire group will be seriously affected. Therefore, the selection of "unstable" leaders can create value in the short term, but it will cause greater losses in the long term.

Ye Wei, a Tsinghua University student who founded the Qingdao DIY club five years ago, invited a hardware expert from the electronics Department of Tsinghua University to serve as the technical director at the beginning of his business, but soon he left. After that, I changed my business philosophy. Five years later, not only did I have 30 employees, but my own "qingbei" brand has a considerable influence in the scientific research institutes of Beijing Universities, at the same time, most of the students have spent a lot of energy and financial resources inviting experts to start their own businesses.

Where does "backbone" come from?

Since valuable people may not always become "backbone", the CTO will have such troubles: where does the "backbone" come from?

Use "backbone" based on "career planning ". When promoting and appointing a leader, you must first understand the career planning of the candidate. More and more people will set career plans for themselves and then look for jobs. Therefore, when selecting a job in a Technical Department, you also need to understand the career planning of the job. The job should meet the career planning of the candidate as much as possible. When the job and career planning are different, both new positions and candidates should be competent. If the career planning aims at a position that is not competent, the appointment should be postponed.

"Young and old Cheng" is an important feature of "backbone. Although it is common practice to directly appoint an older employee as the leader, in the long term, older employees are more likely to be further promoted. If the company is difficult to meet their career needs, older employees are "unstable ". Therefore, we should look for "young and old Cheng" members as candidates for the team leader. They will take much longer as the team leader. The channel for creating free comments is one of the effective ways to judge "young and old". For group members who can present unique insights and put them into practice, they can be candidates for the group leader.

Find the appropriate "backbone" from the open-source community ". Although it is not necessary to hire external "experts", the CTO should also participate in open-source communities. Currently, more and more open-source software is used in the software development process, therefore, CTO's participation in the open-source community can not only get the cutting-edge progress of all technologies, but also find active users in the open-source community and find the talents they need, for example, in the xoops open-source community, there are often active users recruited by companies that use xoops technology, and they will soon become the technical backbone after their employment.

"Backbone" is not "brain"

After "backbone" is used, the CTO will face another problem: what should "backbone" do?

Leave "impossible tasks" to the CTO. The work of the technical department has strict time constraints. At the same time, there are often many unpredictable situations in the work. If you assign all the tasks to the team lead directly, the CTO will know that the team lead cannot complete a task only when the progress is delayed. If it happens to be a key task, the overall progress will be seriously affected. Therefore, CTO must consider the following in front of each task: this is a "brain" task or a "backbone" task. In addition, for assigned tasks, the CTO should check with the team lead one by one to determine whether the tasks are completed. For tasks that the team lead is not sure about, the CTO should re-allocate, outsource, or handle the tasks in person.

Leave "sense of accomplishment" to "backbone ". Career planning, material wealth, and sense of achievement are several important reasons for employee job-hopping. Career Planning and material wealth are restricted by the actual situation of the technical department and it is difficult to meet the needs of every employee, therefore, a sense of accomplishment becomes an important way to avoid Team Leader switching. In various occasions, the CTO should leave the decision to the leader as much as possible. On the one hand, the leader is the direct owner of the Group, and his judgment represents the judgment of the group. On the other hand, the process of participation in the decision also gives the leader a sense of responsibility and a sense of accomplishment by completing the task.

Assists "backbone" in career planning. In addition to the sense of accomplishment, the CTO should assist the team lead in career planning and actively discuss career planning to help the CTO understand the appropriate work content of the team lead. In practice, on the one hand, due to the busy work of the CTO, on the other hand, the direct relationship between superiors and subordinates is difficult to understand the true idea. In this case, external experts can be considered to take charge of this work. For example, a senior technical training consultant who has been assisting the CTO of small and medium-sized IT companies for a long time not only reduces the CTO's work pressure, but also reduces the company's direct material incentive expenditure on the team leader, increased cost competitiveness.

Train New employees like creating "documents" with "templates"

Modern enterprises cannot leave office software at work, while the technical department has a lot of documentation work. In order to easily create documents and avoid repetitive work, the frequently used document types will be made into templates, today's office software also supports the template function. When the office software appeared, there was no graphic interface. Even so, the user was ecstatic. Nowadays, office software that does not support the template function is unimaginable.

The IT industry is highly mobile. Therefore, it is one of the main responsibilities of the technical department to train new members to become competent quickly. The faster the new team members enter the working state, the less redundant staff the technical team prepares for employee turnover while controlling the risks of the Technical Department, thus reducing the company's cost. In the work, the longest contact with new team members is the team lead. Therefore, not only should the team lead take on the training of new team members, but also set an exemplary rate for the new team members at work. By setting up the table rate by the team lead, new team members will not create documents directly by creating a template, just like using a template to create a document, but it will greatly speed up document creation in the future. Similarly, the training of team leaders will greatly speed up the new team members to take up their positions.

When the CTO trains new team members through the team lead, it should first start from recruitment, let the team lead recruit new team members, contact the candidates, arrange interviews, and so on, and fully delegate permissions to the team lead. After recruitment, the team lead should perform all the tasks for training new team members as much as possible. The CTO should take advantage of its management experience to assist the team lead in training, rather than technical advantages. We must believe that the team lead can cover the technologies required by the new team members through their own efforts, discover all kinds of problems encountered by the team lead when training the new team members at any time, and help the team lead to complete the training work.

By authorizing the team leader to train new team members, the new team members can feel that their career plans are valued by the company, establish a disruptive relationship between the team leader and the new team members, and promptly discover their resignation tendencies. In practice, you can select a development kit based on knowledge management to further reduce the workload of the team leader, such as techexcel devsuite, by using tools, the team lead can organize the knowledge of the current team members into training materials for new team members, just as easily creating a document using a template.

Agile team lead

Agile Software development is a general term for some new software development methods that have aroused widespread attention in 1990s. Due to the wide variety of organizational structures, the technical departments should organize according to the characteristics of their organizations. Therefore, agile software development is often not used, but in the construction of the Technical middle layer, however, the agile principle can be fully used for reference. Even if the technical department adopts other working methods as a whole, the agile principle will still help improve the working cooperation between the team leaders.

"Taking delivery rather than construction as the core", the team leader should establish a sense of delivery and understand that his/her responsibilities are to deliver work results. He should share the constructed work with the team members. When the delivery period is tight, we should first choose to temporarily expand the team size to share the workload, while the Team Leader's attention is focused on delivering valuable work results. If the team leader puts effort into sharing the workload, it is possible to deliver work results only according to the initial work plan, rather than valuable work results.

For "face-to-face communication", the leader must always prepare face-to-face communication. In any case, the leader should directly communicate face-to-face with other leaders, if necessary, call more team leaders and their respective team members to solve the problem while identifying the problem. If the team leader raises the problem at the weekly work meeting, this not only delays problem resolution, but other groups may need to review their work content.

"Iterative delivery of new versions", in terms of delivery cycle, the CTO should authorize the leader to determine the iteration cycle, and deliver intermediate iteration versions at any time according to the needs of other groups, reduce the time spent by groups waiting for new versions, in order to reduce the negative impact of pre-developed plans. If the team delivers the new version at a scheduled time, not only will the other teams waste time waiting, but it will also affect the number of iterations before delivery.

In practice, Wang Jin, CTO of the Web and Software Research Center of Tsinghua University, draws on the "agile" principle, the team with full-time and students working loosely together is built into a "compact and self-organized team" to free itself from the daily coordination work.