Thousands of Sberbank programmers have moved to the new Agile Home office. PHOTO

Main article: Agile software development

2017

Thousands of Sberbank programmers moved to new Agile Home office

As of mid-May 2017, more than 4 thousand people moved to the new office of Sberbank in Moscow, which is being equipped for the work of teams in the Agile format. The move is ongoing. This was told by TAdviser Agile-coach of Sberbank Natalya Polyachenko.

The new office of Sberbank called Agile Home will completely occupy the building of the business center at Kutuzovsky Prospekt, 32/1. It has 16 floors. In the future, about 9-10 thousand employees of Sberbank will be able to work here, says Polyachenko. As of May, the 1st, 3rd-6th and 12th-15th floors of the building have been commissioned.

In accordance with the new principles of work, employees are now divided into "tribes" - divisions working on various areas of products and services. In addition to the "grocery" "tribs," there are "tribs" that are working on platform solutions of Sberbank itself.

Each "tribe" consists of 15 teams, including about 10 people. They are working on sprint tasks for a period of two weeks each, Polyachenko said.

At the same time, previously business and IT employees existed separately, and now both of these parties are represented in the same team and work together on products. Natalya Polyachenko told TAdviser that as of May, approximately 25% of employees in the new office are business representatives, and 75% are IT representatives.

The infrastructure of the new office is built both around the "tribs" and separately around the teams. The office space is organized so that the teams, on the one hand, are quite isolated from each other, and on the other, they are close to each other.

On the 15th floor of Agile Home, where TAdviser visited, as of May, there are two "tribe" - digital products and mass personalization. In addition to workplaces for employees, there is a conference area, meeting rooms, booths for telephone conversations or tete-a-tete conversations, etc.

The main goal of Agile transformation is to accelerate the introduction of new products to the market. The head of the Retail Business block of Sberbank, Alexander Torbakhov, noted in a conversation with TAdviser that when working on the old model, up to 2 years can pass from the appearance of an idea to the release of a product on the market. According to the Agile model, Sberbank plans to fit into several months.

Sberbank began the agile transformation with a retail business. Alexander Torbakhov told TAdviser that as of May, almost all retail products have already been transferred to development according to the Agile methodology.

As of May 2017, one tribe was formed for corporate products - for medium and small businesses, Natalya Polyachenko told TAdviser.

Alexander Torbakhov noted that the transformation process is not easy: the teams have already been built in a new way, but the restructuring of the production process is more complex and lengthy. So far, in Sberbank, developers, testers and those who operate systems are individual people. At the same time, in a "fully Agile" environment, all these specialties should merge into one - an engineer, and one team is able to carry out a full cycle - from idea to launch into commercial operation, says Torbakhov.

It is planned to transfer the development to Agile in full for the retail business by the end of 2017, Torbakhov told TAdviser.

The source of the photo in this material is TAdviser.

Three offices in Agile format

Sberbank has adapted its new office in house 32 on Kutuzovsky Prospekt for work in the Agile methodology. Such a model implies the creation of cross-functional commands within the office for faster and more efficient execution of tasks.

Alisa [1] Melnikova, CEO of Sberbank-Technologies, said in an interview with TAdviser that the first wave of Agile transformation was carried out with the bank's retail unit and covered more than 1,100 SberTekh employees. By the end of 2017, according to her, it is planned to involve other blocks in Agile.

The result of the work already done was an increase in the speed and quality of interaction between the retail business unit and developers, Melnikova said.

To create a new office space, Sberbank invited three Russian architectural bureaus, which independently implemented their solutions on three floors of the new Moscow office.

IND Architects Project

On the 15th floor, the project was carried out by the IND Architects team. The^[1], which in 2013 already implemented an office under Agile for Alfa-Bank - Alfa Laboratory. The office is divided into six parts, connected by a "ring road," which allows you to better navigate the space and get to the desired point faster.

The floor area is 7 thousand square meters. m. Each of the six parts of the office is completely autonomous and created according to a single scheme: there is an open-space along the glazing front, in the core there are negotiations of different types, a lounge, coffee point and bathrooms. The calculation is made in order to spend the minimum amount of time moving around the office and not be distracted from concentrated work. All the functional spaces that teams will need are at hand within walking distance.

Each of the six zones is divided into blocks. Approximately ten teams can work in one zone.

The Agile office is not tied to departments and there are no executive offices, managers, like ordinary employees, are located in an open space and use all services on a par with members of their teams.

Architects have provided a diverse set of rooms: small meeting rooms for quick meetings, large meeting rooms for concentrated discussion of issues, individual call rooms, work areas with soft furniture. In the center of the office there are two large presentation rooms, in addition to stacked chairs with tables, there are universal sofas that can be used to work at laptops.

Aurora Project

In the representation of the architectural bureau Aurora, a new type of office space implies extreme flexibility: convenience in forming teams, the possibility of self-organization and constant two-level interaction.^[2]

The first level - the so-called squads (English squad) - are self-organizing working groups consisting of 10-15 specialists of various profiles, a kind of small startups. The second level is the tribe (English tribe), into which squads are combined. For four tributes on the floor, areas of joint work are allocated, each of which can accommodate about 200 people.

Initially, the building was designed for apartments, so the floor was divided into fire compartments, which did not imply the free movement of human flows through it. With the help of engineering and technical solutions, it was possible to withstand all fire standards and requirements and take into account the needs of a typical tribe: for its successful functioning, about eight meeting rooms, one coffe point and two vending machines are needed.

An ergonomic planning solution made it possible to make the office spacious and provide comfortable working conditions: convenient workplaces along the glazing front, recreation and informal communication areas, co-working space and coffee points, libraries and blocks with a meeting room with marker boards on the walls and built-in storage systems - all in the core of the office. On the 14th floor there is the largest number of jobs - about 750, which met the requirement of the terms of reference.

Project Adetail

Another floor was entrusted to the architectural bureau "Adetail"^[3].

In the project of this team, the office is divided into many work areas, which are located both in the open space and in the meeting rooms, which are used for the work of project teams.

The office structure itself is subject to a common formation of working groups - the so-called squats. One squat consists of 8-10 people who work on a specific task. Global issues require squatting together and form a new unit - tribe. Thus, there are no fixed jobs in the office, but there are many areas for the work of squats and the ability to combine them into tribes.

For the convenience of scaling the space, architects resorted to the use of sliding partitions, which divide both open spaces and meeting rooms (of which there are 37 in the office) into several zones or combine them into a single room.

In the center of the office there is a special zone with a semicircular wooden volume and a marker board, where tribes can discuss the results achieved and set new tasks. Glass partitions serve not only as a division of zones, but also as a kind of task board, where the employees of each squat glue stickers on the current development process of the project.

Large screens are located above each table and a conference call system is installed so that you can freely contact colleagues from other offices.

The office has 4 kitchens and 11 coffee rooms where employees can have a snack and relax. A large number of informal areas for work, such as coupe sofas, poufs, etc., create the feeling of a "typical" office space.

2016

German Gref: Agile is the most radical transformation in the history of Sberbank

In September 2016, a video was posted on the Sberbank website in which the President of the Bank, German Gref, talks about the advantages and tasks of the upcoming Agile transformation.

If earlier Agile was a way to write program code, today it is a way of existence of all organizations, he noted.

{{Quote 'But the most important thing is speed. Requirements change so quickly, the world is changing so quickly. And we make so many mistakes in traditional technologies that we cannot measure this. In order to raise the speed radically, it is necessary to change the entire control system and the entire system of our work with you, said the President of Sberbank}}

Gref considers the upcoming transformation colossal, the most radical in the history of the bank.

So that no one is fooled, it will take a lot of effort from all of us and, first of all, mental effort, a very serious change in our culture, guys: Design Thinking, Collaboration. Collaboration is probably the most important thing. Creativity, because you will need to come up with new solutions, you will need to redesign all our unusable processes. This will require such an important skill as Problem Solving, i.e. the ability to find a non-standard solution to very problematic problems. This requires such a position as systematic thinking, so that you can not only immerse yourself in the details, but emerge from there and see the whole problem from a helicopter height.

Concluding the performance, Herman Gref admitted that every day "we have more and more confidence that we will be successful." In this phrase, behind the president of Sberbank, one of the participants in the event yawned.

Agile Transformation Pilots

In June 2016, Sberbank decided to hire a consultant company to prepare a detailed program for transforming the structure and management model based on the target model of the Agile organization.

The corresponding request for proposals^[4] was announced on June 24, and the winner was selected on July 8.

The initial contract price was 345 million rubles. The tender received three proposals. The most expensive - for 345 million rubles - from McKinsey, the winner of Sberbank's previous tender for training top managers in the basics of Agile (see more below). With an application in the amount of 340 million rubles, Bain & Company responded to the request for proposals, and for 99.999 million rubles, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) expressed its readiness to provide services to Sberbank.

Sberbank chose McKinsey as the winner. Boston Consulting Group scored the fewest points despite the minimum bid price.

According to the results of the work, which are scheduled until January 31, 2017, McKinsey will receive 120.7 million rubles. Sberbank will pay another 224 million rubles if the key performance indicators are met (Sberbank did not disclose their essence in the TA).

McKinsey will have to prepare proposals for changing the structure, functions and management processes of Sberbank in order to move to the target model of the Agile organization. It is also necessary to describe in detail the tools of the Agile organization for implementation in the first wave (based on the approved target model and transformation approaches) and describe the organizational perimeter of the first wave.

After that, the consultant will be required to provide support for piloting the selected agile elements in the current phase and conduct trainings for key participants in the first wave of transformation in order to ensure a sufficient level of readiness of pilot teams and an effective start.

According to Sberbank's expectations, the new structure and model of bank management should provide a radical reduction in the duration of creating new products (time to market). Management decisions should be developed and made at high speed, the bank management system should become cheaper, and innovative activities should become more intensive.

Training top managers in the basics of Agile

During April 2016, McKinsey taught Sberbank's top managers the principles of bimodal and Agile organization. The company won the provision of such services in the corresponding competition with an application in the amount of 53.9 million rubles^[4]. The initial price was 55 million rubles. McKinsey's competitors in the competition were Deloitte, Accenture and EMC.

Along with training under the contract, McKinsey determined the target model of the Agile organization for Sberbank. This is necessary in order to further develop a program for transforming the structure and management model based on the principles of bimodal and Agile organization in the bank.

McKinsey was required to describe possible organizational models, approaches to transforming the bank's management model and structure based on the principles of Agile and bimodal organization, and to diagnose the bank in terms of readiness for transformation and choosing the best approach (including from the point of view of HR readiness, IT readiness, maturity of the main management processes, realism of changes in corporate culture - based on previous diagnostics of corporate culture), recommendations on the choice of approach were prepared, a transformation plan was developed.

In order to train top managers of Sberbank, the contractor was supposed to organize their visits to large foreign companies operating on the basis of the principles of bimodal and Agile-organization - to study best practices and exchange experience, as well as hold sessions on the topic "Practices of transformation of large organizations within Agile and bimodal approaches" with the involvement of leading international experts in these areas.

Gref is the main engine of the Agile approach

Bank President German Gref spoke about Sberbank's transformation plans in January 2016.

We were very proud of our program 2.0 ": Sberbank is completing a large-scale IT project to centralize IT systems, the way we have seriously advanced in recent years, we have invested colossal amounts. But as soon as Sberbank built a super data center, we came to the conclusion that they were absolutely uncompetitive. It was a terrible conclusion, for me personally it was a blow just

Sberbank, according to Gref, is losing competition not to other Russian banks, but to international IT companies - Amazon, Google and others.

In 2015, Sberbank made 27 thousand changes to its IT platform, and five years ago it made 600-800 changes a year, Gref said. In 2016, Sberbank plans to make 41,000 changes, but this is not comparable with Amazon, which makes 10,000 changes to its platform per day. The current platform of Sberbank, according to its president, is huge and inflexible: changes in one part require 2-3 months of testing, since it is not clear "where and what will fly at the same time."

The new IT platform will be built on the basis of the Agile approach (it involves dividing large projects into small ones to accelerate the output of updates and improvements to the productive circuit), it follows from the words of Gref^[5].

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Notes