Evolution and Best Practices of Youzan's Efficiency Platform

The internet era has seen most companies adopt various PMIS (Project Management Information Systems) or team collaboration software to support and assist project management activities.

Tools are essential for effective project management. Excellent project management systems and collaboration software are crucial for project managers to manage projects efficiently and create value. For enterprises, these systems are important infrastructure, enabling digital flow and coordination of people, tasks, and resources, continuously generating value in an orderly manner.

In this domain, well-known and commercially successful software includes Microsoft's SharePoint and Project, Atlassian's JIRA and Confluence, and more recently, Chinese companies like Tower and Teambition. However, while purchasing these mature software services offers extensibility, it also comes with challenges such as longer build times and higher costs.

Youzan accepted this challenge in 2017 and began developing its own 'Efficiency Platform.' This article introduces the system's development practices over the past two years, aiming to provide some insights and inspiration.

1. Evolution of the Efficiency Platform

1.1 Early Stages

The Efficiency Platform was initially developed to address the high operational costs of using multiple systems for daily collaboration. At the time, Youzan's project management was primarily based on the JIRA platform, supplemented by a self-developed QA platform and PMO internal tools (based on JIRA API). Youzan faced several challenges:

Lack of functional support tailored to the company's actual application scenarios, making the tools difficult to use.

Project initiation was still done manually offline, resulting in incomplete data deposition, limited to the development side.

Diverse types of development processes made unified management difficult.

The early versions of the Efficiency Platform primarily addressed these issues. After intensive planning and development, the initial versions were launched, achieving the following goals:

Unified data models, including projects, tasks, members, and milestones.

Process management from project initiation to launch, task tracking, etc.

Based on 'fault statistics,' 'team project participation,' and 'future productivity assessment,' a basic platform was constructed.

1.2 Functionality Enhancement Period

After establishing the system framework and confirming the long-term goal of the Efficiency Platform to 'synchronize company information, collaborate, and ultimately improve company efficiency,' we realized that the current version could not fully support comprehensive collaboration. The most important task was to supplement various 'infrastructure' based on actual needs.

Infrastructure building began:

(1) Demand lifecycle and workflow construction: We built a demand management model and workflow suitable for Youzan's needs. Product managers create and manage demands on the Efficiency Platform, which go through pre-scheduling, initiation, and demand review before being handed over to the development side. Additionally, we built a 'daily demand' type outside of projects for small, quick tasks requiring five or fewer developers.

(2) Agile practice tool support: We developed an iterative development model (Scrum model) to support agile practices in suitable scenarios within the company.

(3) Efficiency data deposition and display: During Youzan's project management process, we deposited a large amount of process data. After processing and integration, these data are presented in visual charts or reports in a dedicated data module, serving as an objective efficiency dashboard for various business lines.

(4) Standardized process management tools: In the project management practices of various business lines, we summarized many process management experiences. These experiences were digitized and productized, standardizing many process management tools, such as monthly planning and intelligent scheduling tools.

(5) Integration with internal systems: While improving the basic capabilities of the Efficiency Platform, we integrated it with other self-developed systems within the company, such as CI systems, testing systems, and operations systems, achieving 'one-stop' management on the product development side.

Additionally, we integrated with WeChat Work, allowing users to quickly create groups and communicate efficiently, enabling information from the Efficiency Platform to naturally permeate daily work communication through 'push notifications,' 'group applications,' and 'bots.'

1.3 Innovation and Expansion Period

After basic functionality was supplemented, the company could rely on the 'Efficiency Platform' infrastructure for orderly operation. With 'small guns and rifles,' we knew we needed more innovation and practice to achieve greater value—we needed airplanes, tanks, and even nuclear weapons.

Here, we introduce a few of our recent 'studies':

1.3.1 Merchant Demand Handling and SLA

Youzan is a B2B company, and merchants are our direct users and customers. Youzan places great importance on merchant experience and real needs, requiring the product and development sides to promptly address and respond to merchant demands, ensuring that merchant demands occupy a certain proportion of overall product demands.

Within the Efficiency Platform, we designed a complete process mechanism and SLA for 'merchant demand handling' from proposal to launch. We also integrated and output data on 'merchant demands' at various stages to assist in process improvement.

1.3.2 Demand Prioritization

Every company wants its resources to be continuously invested in 'valuable' tasks. To ensure resources are invested in important and urgent work, we designed a 'demand prioritization' process in the second half of 2019, identifying high-priority demands each month and allocating resources to ensure their development and launch.

1.3.3 Value Loop

Demand prioritization cannot guarantee that all our work is 100% valuable because demands realize their value only after launch. If we only focus on demand launch without tracking post-launch results, it's like a chef serving a dish and then closing the kitchen door, ignoring customer feedback. Such a restaurant wouldn't last long.

We designed the 'value loop' to introduce the 'post-process' of demands into the Efficiency Platform for the first time—i.e., what happens after a demand is launched. This requires our product managers (chefs) to review the value of demands at least once within 30 days of launch and form conclusions and depositions. These conclusions will be important auxiliary materials in the next business planning meeting to help improve decision-making accuracy.

2. Positioning of the Efficiency Platform—Three 'Self-Cultivations'

To achieve the goal of the Efficiency Platform being both 'infrastructure' and a 'leap platform,' we summarized three key words for its positioning:

2.1 Efficiency

Efficiency is defined as 'efficiency = efficiency + effectiveness.' This positioning reminds designers and participants that we care not only about efficiency but also about effectiveness.

Peter Drucker, in 'The Effective Executive,' distinguishes between 'efficiency' (doing things right) and 'effectiveness' (doing the right things). Modern enterprises, especially internet companies, can no longer rely on labor-intensive or resource-intensive management and measurement methods.

Youzan uses the OKR method for organizational management, breaking down O (objectives) into KR (key results), which are further divided into a series of AC (actions) to achieve these results. Executing AC quickly and efficiently is 'efficiency'; whether these ACs successfully promote KR and KR promote O is 'effectiveness.' Therefore, efficiency (efficiency + effectiveness) is the measurement standard and correct perspective for achieving organizational OKRs, and the ability to achieve OKRs is the internal driving force for everyone to focus on efficiency. The two are mutually reinforcing.

2.2 Collaboration

'Collaboration' has been explored and evolved since the emergence of human society. Within a company, this for-profit organization, 'collaboration' is a basic skill and core combat capability.

If an organization cannot leverage the collaborative advantages of individuals, it cannot survive in a competitive market environment; if an organization cannot better develop 'collaboration' capabilities and create greater collaborative value, it will gradually lose competitiveness due to internal attrition.

In the practice of the Efficiency Platform, we believe that the core of collaboration is 'breaking down barriers':

Breaking down barriers between people: Barriers between people refer to inefficiencies and low efficiency caused by physical distance and work scenarios. Of course, the system cannot solve the problem of physical distance; we mainly address the issue of work scenarios. The Efficiency Platform can design sufficiently appropriate work methods or processes based on work scenarios, helping people to self-organize and collaborate efficiently within rules.

Breaking down barriers between people and information: If people cannot access sufficient information during work, it will lead to incorrect decision-making directions and low execution efficiency, resulting in a mismatch between efforts and goals. The Efficiency Platform is a bridge between people and information, breaking down barriers between people and information while collecting, filtering, and distributing effective information, reducing efficiency losses and waste caused by lack of transparency.

Breaking down barriers between information and information: Barriers between information and information are actually the integration of information and systems. No one wants to use 10 systems or 20 inconsistent data sources to complete a task. A unified portal and information specifications ensure consistent understanding, reducing communication and learning costs.

2.3 Loop

'Loop' is a concept from control theory, frequently used in process design, business model analysis, and corporate governance in the internet era. In fact, 'loop' represents a worldview and methodology, a universally applicable idea of continuous improvement through cycles.

The Efficiency Platform, tasked with improving Youzan's efficiency, must be 'looped.' In addition to ensuring that all our functions are 'looped' in terms of tool attributes, we also require every PM to continuously promote the idea and process management based on the Efficiency Platform, ensuring that the organization and every individual within it progress in a rolling, circular manner, rather than being pushed or pulled.

Conclusion—Against the Wind and Waves, There Will Be a Time

Over the past two years, the Efficiency Platform has evolved from its initial stages to becoming a collaboration platform tailored to Youzan's needs, now an indispensable system for daily work and project management.

While our past work may not have been perfect, we are deeply aware of our responsibilities. We will continue to refine the product and hope to share our latest understandings with you soon.