Chapter 375: Simplifying Complex Problems
The work of writing massive amounts of code was carried out in full swing.

With the strong support of Professor Mai Wen's team and the special team assigned by Huang Zhan, Li Yan now has abundant human resources at her disposal.

Professor Mai has sixty people from three project research groups and a research institute team under Academician Ni - but they are all good people. With Professor Mai acting as the middle manager, it is no problem for them to unleash the combat effectiveness of a normal corporate R&D team of 150 people.

Huang Zhan sent out a hundred people, all of whom were veterans who had experience in developing the mobile version of the Windows system. Although his company was large in scale, because he single-handedly took charge of the production line, there were actually only more than three hundred people in the R&D department. When he had the task of producing W9, he was willing to send out a hundred of them, which was sincere enough.

Combined with this wave of cooperation with Chuangzu, apart from the signature of "jointly developed" when the system was released, and the subsequent ability to receive a certain proportion of the profits from the Jiaolong mobile phone, there are no real short-term benefits.

All we can say is that Huang Zhan did a big favor.

A dedicated closed system, with no point in writing the name of the Chuang clan on it.

As for future gains, they are all illusions, and now the Chuang clan is in dire straits. It would be futile to make huge investments and wait for illusory future gains.

If Huang Zhan really cared about profits, why didn't he ask Li Yan for shares?
The board of directors was also very puzzled by this and even impeached Huang Zhan at the meeting.

Someone asked Li Yan to pay a large sum of money as if he had purchased Chuangzu's R&D services.

Some people asked to deeply participate in the research and development of Li Yan's entire mobile phone, and then directly let Future Technology become a subsidiary of Chuangzu.

Some people asked Chuangzu to directly terminate the "meaningless cooperation" and concentrate on its own w9 project to directly crush Future Technology.

Most of them are Huang Zhan’s relatives.

Huang Zhan is a person who attaches great importance to control, and the talks with Lao Lei broke down because of the shares.

These relatives, who actually don't understand mobile phones, only argue with him based on their own interests, and he is too lazy to respond.

So he simply ignored all the opinions.

Huang Zhan's "stubbornness" has happened more than once or twice, but before he always believed in himself, but this time, he chose to believe in Li Yan.

And in fact, he was somewhat selfish - it was impossible for him to defeat Pineapple Company on his own, but there was still such a possibility in Li Yan.

In the past, American technology was always at the forefront. As the so-called rising star, they were always the ones who shocked the world.

This time, let them try to learn from others.

Managing a team of 200 people is not an easy job.

In fact, Mai Wen and Huang Zhan were both worried about Li Yan. After all, he was not the direct person in charge of either team, so both the efficiency of information transmission and the strength of implementing ideas would inevitably be compromised.

Mai Wen himself once led a team of 60 people as the first person in charge to work on a project. He was exhausted every day just from following up on everyone's progress and answering their questions.

Division of labor does not mean simply assigning you to do something and him to do something else. The workload cannot be divided absolutely equally, not to mention that there is also the issue of speed between groups.

It often happens that Group A slacks off after finishing their work, while Group B, despite working very hard, cannot catch up with the progress.

There is a lot of coordination and communication between the teams. Sometimes A does A and B does B, and each team completes their tasks, but when they connect, it’s a mess, which is equivalent to asking the third team to redo the work…

People are not machines, so they are bound to have their own little tricks, or they add a lot of personal ideas to prove their ability, or they want to be lazy and do things slowly, or they bury their heads in work and ignore the overall progress.

Not to mention the messy interpersonal relationships, it is not uncommon for conflicts between small teams or groups to lead to mistakes in key areas of the project.

In the end, Mai Wen was forced to gather all sixty people together to work, but he was still overwhelmed every day.

Later he concluded that the main reason was that he did not have enough prestige among these sixty people - because there were also a group of other academicians' teams at the time, so it was difficult to establish a sufficiently smooth operating mechanism.

Many large companies die because of their systems after they grow to a certain size. Either the boss is too exhausted to do his job, or they are too bloated and have too many employees.

Although Li Yan is the boss of the company, his company currently has only a dozen people. Except for a housekeeping manager, the others don't even have a proper job. It is a small team that relies entirely on his own abilities.

Let alone managing two hundred people, even sixty people would be difficult enough.

Now there are two teams, which is a hell level of difficulty.

Fortunately, Mai Wen and Huang Zhan were willing to act as middlemen.

On the first day of the official launch, Li Yan stunned Mai Wen and Huang Zhan with a plan.

Li Yan actually broke down the division of labor into individual tasks.

What is this concept?
He handled such a huge workload by himself and divided the work among everyone according to their expertise and experience.

The management was completed in the simplest and crudest way.

"I just want results." Li Yan said to Mai Wen.

Personal influence and prestige are not important. There is no need to talk about those nonsense.

You are all elites, so I will assign tasks to you. If you complete them, Li Yan’s goal will be achieved. If you fail to complete them, you will be embarrassed.

Li Yan doesn't care about how internal communication and mutual learning are carried out.

Mai Wen was very surprised. He then realized that his concerns were alleviated a little - the main reason for the poor division of labor was that few people could sort out all the work content required for the entire project on their own.

Li Yan did it, which is to simplify difficult projects, but his approach itself is as difficult as climbing to the sky.

"How... did you do it?" Mai Wen flipped through the plan. He couldn't imagine how horrible the workload would be to sort out all those time nodes and work contents.

"It was not easy. It took me several nights."

Mai Wen had become accustomed to Li Yan's casual pretense, but he found it unrealistic to come up with such a detailed division of labor in just a few nights.

So Professor Mai opened the plan in front of Li Yan and read it carefully. The more he read, the more frightened he became.

He carefully studied the areas he was good at and found that Li Yan's control over the workload was also very good.

How many people are involved in creating a certain piece of content, and how much time is spent on it, is actually taken into consideration?
It won't be too simple, making these experts feel like they are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, nor will it be too difficult, making them feel unhappy.

It just got stuck on the line of "needs to be taken seriously but is actually done".

And in this plan, Mai Wen still had a lot of things that he couldn't understand at all...

"Have you allocated the workload and time?"

"Yes, this is more convenient." Li Yan said, "and I also need to pursue efficiency."

"...Do you understand the entire system's R&D process?" Mai Wen didn't even know how to ask for a moment.

"Correct."

"Then doesn't it mean that you can create this system on your own?" Mai Wen's expression was a little out of control. He knew that Li Yan was powerful, but how could he become more and more powerful?

"If I had enough time," Li Yan shrugged, "unfortunately I don't have it, so I have to rely on everyone's hands."

So these elites are just your code-writing machines? "It's amazing." Mai Wen just exclaimed.

"Professor Mai, I may need your help to follow up on the specific work arrangements."

"No problem, but I have a question for you," Mai Wen shook the plan in his hand, "Even if everyone can submit the results according to your plan, how do you plan to integrate them? Did you write a plan too?"

"Then don't write it. It's useless to write it." Li Yan shrugged again. "For something that requires cooperation, it's meaningless to write 'cooperation' on it."

Mai Wen smiled, raised his head slightly, and showed off his superior jawline. "This job may be more difficult than the previous one. If you don't think of a good solution at the beginning, a lot of rework is foreseeable. This is my previous experience."

"Yes, so I have figured out a solution."

"Oh?"

"I come."

...?
Mai Wen retracted his superior jawline again, "You, handle it alone?"

"Well, we don't have to wait until everyone has handed it in before we start." Li Yan said with a smile, "If we follow the plan, they are like building a puzzle for me, and I can do it anytime."

Mai Wen couldn't even imagine how much work this would take.

"I know exactly what I want, Professor Mai." Seeing Mai Wen's puzzled look, Li Yan explained sincerely, "I know exactly what can be cut out and what must be done. Once the ideas and goals are clear, some things are not as difficult as you think."

"That does make sense."

"Especially for projects without reference experience, a lot of time is wasted on 'trying'. On my side, I've always been 'achieving'."

After Li Yan left, Mai Wen actually felt relaxed.

When he talked to the child now, there was always something beyond his cognition, which made him feel very tired.

He explained the situation to Academician Ni, trying his best to remain objective during the process, but after he finished speaking, he always felt like he was praising Li Yan.

Academician Ni understood some of the details, then pondered for a long time before he said with emotion:
"In the past few decades that I have worked, China has never lacked high-level technical talents, and there are also people with outstanding management capabilities, but there is a lack of talents who can combine the two, so there has been no progress in system engineering. If the pursuit of profit is added, just like several projects of Lianxiang in the past, the ending will only be collapse halfway.

"What is commendable is that Li Yan is a manager, but he also has a very strong technical level and is actually a genius with outstanding abilities... The natural barrier of this system engineering project has directly become a river. Let's see him build a bridge across it and watch the river surge."

The old man was also moved, as he was the only one who knew the bitterness he had endured over the past few decades. He originally thought that the development of a domestic operating system would be a long way off, but he did not expect that hope would be placed on an underage genius.

"That's what genius means, Maiwen."

Mai Wen nodded silently.

Needless to say, Huang Zhan gave his full support. Boss Huang was no longer surprised by the magical things that Li Yan could do.

His concerns were different from Mai Wen's: "I heard that you plan to complete the Hetu system before New Year's Day?"

"Yes."

"No... According to your proposal, it will take until late November just to complete the kernel code. You also need to integrate it. Can you build a system in less than a month?"

"We still have to see the situation and try our best."

Huang Zhan breathed a sigh of relief. "Then I feel relieved. I thought you were determined, so you just wanted to give us some time to urge us to move?"

"more or less."

What Li Yan is actually looking at is whether he can still break through the 70% barrier. If he can gain new improvements in the subsequent code integration work and further upgrade his capabilities, then nothing is impossible.

At the same time, there was an uproar in the future technology community about this plan.

"Let me tell you, Mr. Li is in control of everything. I think he already has all the details of the entire phone in his mind. It's just that it takes too much time to do it alone, so he asked us to be the workers."

Shang Jie has become a loyal fan of Li Yan.

Sun Miao subconsciously wanted to refute it, but he really couldn't refute it at all.

Of course they knew the value of this plan. How could it be written without "controlling everything" as Shang Jie said?

However, this also weakens their identity as "project managers".

From being a project leader who coordinated everything, I became a team leader responsible for collecting homework in class.

"Mr. Shang is right. I always felt that he had already figured out how to make all the software, but he just didn't have time to do it so he gave it to me." Liu Liwei nodded.

"What a strange man..." Sun Miao sighed and shook his head, "Is it a good thing or a bad thing for us to follow such a boss?"

"Of course it's a good thing!" Liu Liwei said loudly, "With such a great boss, we just need to follow his lead and hopefully create history. Is there any better opportunity than this?"

"..."Sun Miao pursed his lips.

"Foreman Sun has his own pursuits," Cao Haibin, who was studying the work content under his management, suddenly said, "Like that, the sour air of the literati."

"What literati..." Sun Miao rolled his eyes.

"The opportunity to create history and change the world is right before you. It's stupid to worry about self-realization at this time," said Cao Haibin.

Sun Miao didn't say anything, but just read the plan silently.

The work officially started like this. Li Yan did not stipulate everyone's working posture. People like Cao Haibin who liked to argue went directly to Chuangzu Company. At this time, he did not say anything about his disagreement with Huang Zhan, because "it's quite nice to be able to manage Huang Zhan's employees"; and Shang Jie preferred to communicate with everyone in the project team online, although basically no one replied to the messages he sent out - the funny thing was that this did not affect their research and development progress at all.

The homework collection group leader is only responsible for collecting the homework.

Sun Miao is a hard-working person. He learned and managed the team while working for Mai Wen, and also participated in code writing himself. Gradually, he showed signs of becoming one of the team members.

Everyone is working in full swing, and Li Yan is very pleased to see that.

Then I ran to class.

Sun Miao was about to report on his work, but Wang Zi told him that Li Yan had gone to class. He suddenly felt helpless.

"No, Sister Wang, isn't the boss too willful? What's the point of having a class at this critical moment?"

Wang Zi recalled the reasons Li Yan told her and replied:

“It is natural for students to learn.”

"...That's true, but now is an extraordinary time. We..."

"It's no use for him to wait until the results come out."

Sun Miao held his breath for a long time, and could only sigh: "There's really nothing we can do about him."

(End of this chapter)