Advanced Exploration and Practice of Value Delivery in Project Management

On October 25‑26, the 12th QECon Global Quality & Efficiency Conference was held in Beijing, coinciding with Programmer's Day (1024). The theme "AI Empowerment, Driving the Co‑evolution of Quality and Efficiency" attracted thousands of technology professionals. iQIYI’s project management team presented a talk titled "Advanced Exploration and Practice of Value Delivery".

The digital era has shifted the Internet industry from rapid growth to a focus on refined, value‑oriented operations. Since 2021, enterprises have moved from incremental competition to stock‑based competition, requiring a transition from coarse‑grained growth to precise, resource‑efficient value delivery.

Value delivery emphasizes the entire lifecycle—from goal setting to result evaluation—aiming to achieve greater business impact with fewer resources. iQIYI has built a systematic value‑delivery framework to accelerate project rollout and support business growth.

Pain points in current value delivery:

Difficulty aligning goals across departments and business units.

Gap between planning and execution, leading to scope drift.

Lack of standardized metrics for measuring delivery quality and business value.

Insufficient tool support for end‑to‑end process and data collaboration.

To address these challenges, iQIYI designed a two‑scenario model covering iterative projects and special projects, centered on fine‑grained management.

Iterative Project Value‑Delivery Process

Core Goal Definition: At the beginning of each quarter, project managers coordinate with business, product, and technical teams to align on core OKRs.

Goal Advancement & Monitoring: Prioritize key requirements, deliver them efficiently, and continuously monitor outcomes, adjusting promptly when deviations occur.

Goal Review & Retrospective: At quarter‑end, evaluate goal achievement, extract lessons, and propose optimizations for the next cycle.

Special Project Value‑Delivery Process

Initiation: Define SMART goals, align core team objectives, and estimate costs.

Planning: Create goal‑driven implementation plans and minimal viable product (MVP) roadmaps.

Execution: Control scope tightly around core goals and monitor cost deviations.

Closure: Summarize actual costs and estimate benefit realization time.

Benefit Tracking: Collect stakeholder feedback on actual benefits and synchronize results with core stakeholders.

Three practical case studies illustrate the model:

Case 1 – Iterative Project: Quarterly OKR alignment, three‑layer delivery loops (version, month, quarter), and a set of quantitative metrics such as core‑goal achievement rate, key‑requirement ROI, and focus ratio.

Case 2 – Innovative Special Project: SMART goal setting, MVP validation, rapid termination after a failed experiment, saving over 100 person‑days.

Case 3 – Routine Special Project: Goal decomposition, path planning, demand‑to‑delivery loop, and dual monitoring of leading (e.g., demand launch rate) and lagging (e.g., video view count) indicators.

Future Outlook of Value Delivery

Automation: End‑to‑end automation of planning, execution, monitoring, and evaluation to reduce manual errors.

Integration: A unified lifecycle management platform linking strategy, execution, and retrospection.

Intelligence: Leveraging AI and large‑model technologies for market analysis, goal decomposition, demand planning, and automated retrospectives.

By integrating automation, integration, and intelligence, organizations can significantly boost the efficiency and effectiveness of value delivery, providing stronger support for business growth.