CODING and Thoughtworks help common people's pharmacies create an agile culture of "autonomy, self-determination and automation"

People's Pharmacy is an influential pharmaceutical retail chain enterprise in China, the champion of China's top 100 pharmaceutical retail enterprises in terms of comprehensive competitiveness, the top 500 enterprises in China's service industry, and the top 100 enterprises in Hunan Province.

22 provincial markets such as Hunan, Shaanxi, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, etc. 8000 stores, and the national storage area exceeds square meters.

In the era of digital intelligence, how to better serve the "people"?

With the continuous expansion of business scale, the accumulated membership of People's Pharmacy is approaching the 60 million mark, serving 125 million loyal customers every year. In the digital age, especially in the context of the global epidemic, consumers have put forward higher requirements for service experience and quality. To provide consumers with " more complete, warmer, and more professional " services is not "everything for the common people 161deadb8e509f" of the common people's pharmacy, but also a corporate responsibility related to people's livelihood in the epidemic era.

In the era of ever-changing digital intelligence, how to combine online channels with offline stores to maintain a certain agility and flexibility in the changing market environment? How to focus on business needs and values, improve the team's business response capability and project delivery efficiency internally, and improve service quality and user reputation externally? For ordinary people's pharmacies in the traditional retail industry, agile transformation is undoubtedly the best answer.

People's Pharmacy hopes to use new tools and standardized work processes to build a self-organized agile team, establish agile delivery concepts, cultivate agile seed talents, and improve the team's agile maturity, so that the R&D team has the ability to quickly trial and error and verify assumptions , in order to help enterprises develop soundly and rapidly. agile transformation of 161deadb8e50ca is the choice of history and the call of the .

Thoughtworks first, from 0 to 1 agile import

Thoughtworks has professional cross-functional teams in 17 countries, bringing together a large number of strategists, developers, data engineers and designers. Thoughtworks pioneered the concept of "distributed agile", it knows how to gather the power of global teams to deliver excellent software on a large scale, and is committed to helping customers open the road to smooth digitalization, improving the company's resilience, and navigating the future journey.

After in-depth research on the background information of the R&D department, scope of responsibilities, organizational structure, business pain points, workflow, tools and technologies of the People's Pharmacy, the consultants from Thoughtworks China formulated an agile transformation plan based on CODING. , and implement agile introduction in multiple pilot teams in batches and in an orderly manner.

• Agile organizational structure
  Before the agile transformation, the business team and R&D team of People's Pharmacy lacked strategic synergy. The goals and values of business requirements were often not well conveyed to the R&D team, and cross-group collaboration was costly and hindered. In order to better enhance the value of business delivery, Thoughtworks guided the common people pharmacy to establish a cross-functional organizational structure with business value as the core.

The vertical is a self-organized cross-functional group, including product managers, Scrum Masters (usually concurrently held by developers), architects, developers, and testers, with no more than 10 people. A cross-functional team corresponds to a specific product or business line of the People's Pharmacy, which can fully deliver business value, and can determine product goals and make independent decisions . The flexible small team model facilitates cross-functional members to communicate and discuss face-to-face, and to better collaborate on common business goals.

The horizontal is a collaborative organization within the same function. The functional leader leads the collaborative activities within the function, coordinates the resources for cross-business line cooperation, and promotes cross-team and cross-business line collaboration and improvement.

• agile practice basic training & coaching
  Successful practice needs to be based on solid theoretical knowledge. In the pharmacy of the common people, most members have not yet realized the value and necessity of agile development and continuous delivery, and lack a positive culture and atmosphere of continuous learning and improvement. In response to this problem, Thoughtworks consultants introduced agile values and management practices through a series of trainings, covering basic concepts of agile, basic knowledge of product managers and Scrum Masters, DevOps practices, etc. Why agile is needed and understand how each role can get the most value in the team through the actual project.
• personnel enabling: Agile Coach culture
  In addition to daily practical coaching and training for product managers and Scrum Masters, Thoughtworks also agile coaching training camp model to ensure that the effect of agile transformation is sustainable and scalable. Under the leadership of Thoughtworks consultants, the selected seed players in the organization have undergone a series of intensive training, practical coaching and learning sharing. The final selection of qualified internal coaches will take " practice agility , promote agile " mission, there is a core strength of ⻓ promote agile change in people Dispensary organization.

Use CODING to create a standardized, visualized and automated agile R&D management

The agile transformation of an enterprise requires not only a change in thinking, but also agile concepts and processes through tools. CODING relying on the industry's agile project management methodology and DevOps system to create a one-stop platform, open up the island chain tool and collaboration barriers agile development lifecycle, help people Dispensary build within the organization standardization, visualization, automation agile development management system.

Project and set linkage, standardized business collaboration

Before using CODING, the internal R&D team of the People's Pharmacy organization had limited business transparency. The purpose, scenario, and value of requirements on the business side are not clearly communicated, often resulting in unnecessary communication and understanding costs. Opaque and non-contractual collaboration has resulted in the inability to form sufficient mutual trust between the business side and the R&D side, thereby failing to maximize business value.

After using CODING, people Dispensary the original business requirements in a unified centralized project management . A program set corresponds to a specific product or business line, and then the requirements of different modules under the product/business line are classified through different work items. The business side plans milestones according to the business strategy, and then creates sub-work items under the corresponding demand classification, fills in the specific demand background, description, goal/value, and specifies the start/end time to complete the demand registration.

By "decomposing into projects", the business requirement can be implemented by the product manager by splitting it into user stories and tasks across multiple projects. This is especially important for cross-team and cross-business line collaboration scenarios.

The mapping of business requirements on the R&D side is the user stories in the project and the smallest unit of work in the agile collaboration process. The writing of user stories has been strictly regulated within the People's Pharmacy Organization: must describe clearly user stories and acceptance conditions, and provide necessary detailed descriptions and product prototype diagrams and other information . User stories are the basis of R&D team collaboration. By clarifying the acceptance conditions, products, development and testing can form a consensus on "whether the requirements are done well and do it right", and ensure that the team "thinks in one place and works hard in one place", Deliver business value that meets expectations.

Through the data linkage between the program and the project, the progress, risks and resources of the requirement development are no longer a black box state for the business side; the R&D team can also clearly see the original business carried by the user stories or tasks in the project. Demand, understand the demand goals and values to be achieved, and achieve both "know the truth" and "know the reason". view of separation of data exchange, both sides need to focus on each part of most concern, but also greatly enhanced the transparency of the transfer of business needs , to ensure that the two sides reached consensus on business needs, strengthen cooperation contract between the two sides.

CODING project kanban to visualize agile R&D activities

As a carrier of visual workflow, Kanban is an indispensable factor in agile R&D. The R&D team of People's Pharmacy has made full use of the CODING project kanban to maximize the visualization and transparency of the agile activities within the team.

• Iteration plan
  CODING the Scrum agile project management model provides card-do list , let people Dispensary R & D team can be conducted in a visual manner when planning iterations. On the first day of the iteration, team members will gather around the CODING iteration board to discuss the scope of the iteration, estimate the story points used, and then determine the iteration plan according to the team rate and start the iteration. Through the multi-dimensional data displayed on the Kanban board, team members can clearly know the user stories to be completed in the entire iteration, the priority of each user story, and the estimated man-hours to be spent. This also enables the team members of the People's Pharmacy to carry out efficient teamwork with a common business goal as the core.

• Daily
  Daily stop the meeting, people Dispensary R & D team will Kanban view iteration matters synchronization information and issues daily . Visualize the workflow of user stories through the Kanban view. Which user stories are not yet completed, at what stage, and who is currently working on it. If the user story has met the conditions for moving to the next state, drag it directly to the state card to automatically update the story state. For user stories that are at risk (overdue but not yet completed) or high-priority user stories, team members can identify them with obvious labels, and focus on such matters and conduct necessary discussions in the stand-up meeting.

• Iteration Review
  For each iteration, CODING offer a separate statistical overview and view , provide an important source of data for the iterative review. On the last day of each iteration, the R&D team of the People's Pharmacy will review the work process of this iteration based on the item status trend graph, story ignition graph and item distribution graph provided by CODING, and summarize the good points. Analyze areas for improvement and maintain a culture of continuous improvement and feedback within the team while boosting morale.

CODING's project kanban connects various agile activities within the R&D team of People's Pharmacy in a visual way, effectively reducing collaboration costs. This also just confirms that CODING's one-stop platform is an excellent tool for practicing agile R&D based on agile methodology.

CI/CD pipeline, automated continuous delivery

Before implementing the agile transformation, a major problem faced by the common people's pharmacy was the lack of DevOps engineering practice within the R&D team, which seriously affected the team's delivery ability. Due to the lack of effective automation methods, each version release requires a lot of manpower, and it often happens that all team members stay up late to work overtime.

The automated CI/CD capability provided by CODING has brought great surprises to the R&D team of the People's Pharmacy. The deployment, publishing capability packaged in CI line, and code metrics, assessment and other aspects of artificial curing process, not only can continue to improve the code quality R & D personnel, operation and maintenance capabilities is so moved to the left side of the development, strengthening The self-operation and maintenance ability of R&D personnel is . Version releases that used to be completed overnight can now be completed in just a few minutes, providing a strong guarantee for the R&D team to release high-frequency releases once every two weeks.

The automated CI/CD pipeline will gradually cover all R&D teams within the organization from the pilot team in the follow-up to meet the needs of continuous business release. In addition, People's Pharmacy also showed great enthusiasm for Nocalhost, a cloud-native development tool developed by CODING, and Orbit, a cloud-native application lifecycle management tool. Going to the cloud for the development environment and making full use of cloud computing to build a loosely-coupled system that is elastic, scalable, observable, and easy to manage is undoubtedly the cornerstone to support the continuous business innovation of common people's pharmacies.

The three elements of "people, processes, and tools" complement each other to help agile transformation succeed

Agile transformation is undoubtedly a bold revolution for the common people's large pharmacies. The good news is that this revolution has achieved a phased victory in terms of the agile implementation effect of the pilot team. In the survey of the pilot team of the common people's large pharmacy, 100% of the people believed that agile implementation has helped the team. Of these, 83% believe the current model is more orderly and rhythmic than before, 77% believe it is more transparent than before, and 59% believe the team's ability to deliver has increased by .

Such results are not surprising to Thoughtworks and the People's Pharmacy. Whether it is the consultants of Thoughtworks or the agile coaches cultivated in the big pharmacies of the common people, they have repeatedly mentioned that the first element of the success of agile transformation must be because of "people". The strong support and promotion of the senior management of People's Pharmacy, the active participation and cooperation of team members, and the high integration of consultants are the necessary conditions for the smooth implementation of the agile transformation. In addition, the CODING one-stop platform based on agile methodologies helps common people's pharmacies put standardized agile processes into practice, which is also an indispensable contributing factor. People, processes and tools are indispensable in agile transformation.

The CIO of People's Pharmacy also highly affirmed the implementation of this agile transformation. He mentioned that the enthusiasm of the team has increased, and there is a deeper awareness of the value delivered between the R&D team and the business. Through the CODING software system, managers can grasp the project status of the R&D center at any time, and intervene in advance when risks are discovered, so as to better grasp the project cost and development progress. This makes the development management process of the entire agile R&D center optimized on the ground.

In the next year, People's Pharmacy will promote the agile model from the pilot team to all R&D departments within the organization, completely realizing the top-down agile revolution. CODING will continue to provide support as always, and jointly build a benchmark for the agile transformation of the retail industry in the era of digital intelligence.