About toilet paper, DevOps and 582 banks
Now our team is working on one project, and we have been discussing a lot for two months now, what distinguishes us, as an employer, from other companies? What can be allocated one of the five hundred and eighty two banks (on August 1, 2017), operating in the territory of the Russian Federation? Five hundred and eighty-two organizations with similar goals, Carl!
Not the news that banks have long been involved in the battle for IT-minds, and Raif (Raiffeisenbank) in this story is not an exception. We, like everyone, need developers, analysts, testers, and a whole set of IT experts, followed by recruiters.
“We take money from some and give it to others, and in the process we earn money,” as I formulated to one of my friends the answer to the question “What does your bank do?”.
')
It seems that with such a positioning never won the battle for the minds, which we lead with fashionable youth companies and their inspiring missions:
Yandex: to help people solve problems and achieve their goals in life.
Mail.Ru Group: create the best services for communication and entertainment.
Google: conveniently organize all the information in the world and make it accessible and useful to everyone.
Facebook: to give people the opportunity to share their lives with others and make the world more open and united.
Inspiring? Yes of course. It sounds cool.
Raiffeisenbank defined its mission as follows: the leading universal bank in Russia for all who appreciate quality.
I am sure that we are not alone in the list of 582 banks that have decided that they want to be universal and focused on quality. What then makes us different from everyone else? Why do we believe that we can fight on equal terms for the best minds?
We are inspired by our mission. But it still does not explain how we differ from other banks. There is one more formulation that we often use: a bank of comfortable entrepreneurship. But this does not fully reveal the essence of Rife.
The essence is not immediately visible and is manifested in the details, in conversations, joint tasks, difficulties that the company solves. Here and there you begin to see the key difference.
For me personally, this is a bank in which freedom is the main driving force.
Five years ago, I decided to go to the bank, having no previous experience in the banking sector. Most of the acquaintances twirled their fingers to their heads: "This is a flat, bureaucracy and sheer politicking." And the only argument “for” was something like “well, at least you will earn money.”
Not the most inspiring start? I decided to take a chance.
Our sample bank 2012 and now - two different organizations. Then there was much more mess, we were unrealistically slow and, frankly, it was quite uncomfortable working environment. It makes no sense to describe how everything looked in the past. But now, when they ask me "why go to you, and not to ... (substitute any name of any organization, no matter fashionable, big, foreign or state)", I answer: because we have freedom.
More than 10 years ago I began my career in one of the oil and gas projects, which was managed by a well-known Dutch company. Cool experience, cool company, but only there were standards for ALL. Around the world, every step was literally standardized at all sites. You will laugh, but even the thickness of the toilet paper was adjusted.
Raiffeisenbank - completely from another test. The specificity of this group of companies (unlike most global structures known to me) is the maximum autonomy of national divisions. There is a small set of basic standards, mainly related to business processes (for example, credit policy), and the rest of the approach to “doing business” is determined by local management independently. Most of the tasks in the company are set in the format "how would we achieve the result X", instead of the usual "we need to do A, B, C, so that everything becomes good." When there are no common standards, we invent our own, but only where they are needed.
Why is freedom so important to me personally? It seems to me that without freedom of action it is impossible to cultivate an honest responsibility within the company: any opinion, decision, idea can, with a high probability, pick up and kill someone from above. And gradually you stop to see the point in convincing these "other people." Freedom is not anarchy; in any case, you exist within the system. But free systems differ from those regulated by the volume and number of obstacles that an employee encounters on the way to achieving the goal.
Want examples? I have them.
Without long preludes - a couple of guys (not top managers at all) went to the DevOps Days conference in the USA, got charged with ideas, brought them to the bank, briefly spoke to the management, and after that a campaign of one and a half years began. It was necessary to choose a stack of tools, somehow introduce new ideas into the company's culture, make friends of the team and at the same time not lose good established techniques. As a result, a CI / CD pipeline was built for most of the applications developed in the bank (we’ll tell you about this in the near future, or maybe we’ll get together and make an open meeting). At the same time, no project was registered, the steering committee was not collected, no charts were built, dozens of approvals were not carried out. They played everything according to the principle of a classic venture: they believed in the children, allocated funding and released them. As a result, we got a motivated team, burning with the idea and free from bureaucracy.
More examples?
Who are the banks in the last year or two tried to introduce the role of Scrum-masters? You know what kind of hyip is in the country now on this topic? Suddenly, everyone guessed that Scrum-masters should still be selected, and no, our developer Petr will not be able to earn money as a Scrum-master in his spare time. Companies finally realized that this role was valuable, and everyone sharply rushed to look for people. Not the simplest story, judging by what is heard at conferences and forums. Basically, either companies are trying to give the Scrum-masters money for unreal money, or they buy them “as a service” from a couple of well-known companies.
What did it look like with us? One of the colleagues (“product manager” in the terminology at the time), who was once a Scrum master in his life, came to the management and asked for funding for the experiment: to make his school of Scrum masters and recruit young people with a suitable profile (we were interested in psychological education) and lack of experience in banks and knowledge in Scrum. He did not draw a single slide to sell this idea. The principle of "okay, try, if anything, you can quickly jump off." The “funnel of recruitment” was organized fairly quickly; as a result, out of several dozen sufferers, we still have 9 “schoolchildren”. The training itself was also organized in a cool way - not a boring set of trainings, but gamified lessons. We will tell you about it in detail.
After three months, we received the first group of trained Scrum Masters who are really useful for teams.
Well, another example, from a completely different field: a year and a half ago, the word “fintech” in Raiffeisenbank was known only to a couple or three of the curious. In reality, we had no relations with the Fintech startups market. At some point in the company decided to look at the market as a whole, and to some startups individually. One of our colleagues became interested in this topic and almost single-handedly dragged us into a get-together of innovation banks. Last year alone we conducted 11 pilots with FINTECH start-ups, learned to integrate them into our complex world and test their hypotheses in just 3 months. But most importantly, this girl was able to incite interest in fintech among all representatives of the banking business.
I can throw these examples for a long time, but the bottom line is this: there is enough freedom in our IT department to create and create unusual solutions without hitting the hard boundaries of standards and bureaucracy.
And yes, we can have lunch for more than one hour, we don’t come to work at 9, walk in casual style and even with multi-colored hair, but we value the team and the good mood of our employees much more than anything else.
I happened to work in different companies. And in tech fashionable youth, including. Everyone had something cool. In each one could learn something. But this level of freedom, as in Rife, I have not seen anywhere else.
Not the news that banks have long been involved in the battle for IT-minds, and Raif (Raiffeisenbank) in this story is not an exception. We, like everyone, need developers, analysts, testers, and a whole set of IT experts, followed by recruiters.
Who are you without a cool mission?
“We take money from some and give it to others, and in the process we earn money,” as I formulated to one of my friends the answer to the question “What does your bank do?”.
')
It seems that with such a positioning never won the battle for the minds, which we lead with fashionable youth companies and their inspiring missions:
Yandex: to help people solve problems and achieve their goals in life.
Mail.Ru Group: create the best services for communication and entertainment.
Google: conveniently organize all the information in the world and make it accessible and useful to everyone.
Facebook: to give people the opportunity to share their lives with others and make the world more open and united.
Inspiring? Yes of course. It sounds cool.
Raiffeisenbank defined its mission as follows: the leading universal bank in Russia for all who appreciate quality.
I am sure that we are not alone in the list of 582 banks that have decided that they want to be universal and focused on quality. What then makes us different from everyone else? Why do we believe that we can fight on equal terms for the best minds?
We are inspired by our mission. But it still does not explain how we differ from other banks. There is one more formulation that we often use: a bank of comfortable entrepreneurship. But this does not fully reveal the essence of Rife.
The essence is not immediately visible and is manifested in the details, in conversations, joint tasks, difficulties that the company solves. Here and there you begin to see the key difference.
For me personally, this is a bank in which freedom is the main driving force.
Standards and autonomy
Five years ago, I decided to go to the bank, having no previous experience in the banking sector. Most of the acquaintances twirled their fingers to their heads: "This is a flat, bureaucracy and sheer politicking." And the only argument “for” was something like “well, at least you will earn money.”
Not the most inspiring start? I decided to take a chance.
Our sample bank 2012 and now - two different organizations. Then there was much more mess, we were unrealistically slow and, frankly, it was quite uncomfortable working environment. It makes no sense to describe how everything looked in the past. But now, when they ask me "why go to you, and not to ... (substitute any name of any organization, no matter fashionable, big, foreign or state)", I answer: because we have freedom.
More than 10 years ago I began my career in one of the oil and gas projects, which was managed by a well-known Dutch company. Cool experience, cool company, but only there were standards for ALL. Around the world, every step was literally standardized at all sites. You will laugh, but even the thickness of the toilet paper was adjusted.
Raiffeisenbank - completely from another test. The specificity of this group of companies (unlike most global structures known to me) is the maximum autonomy of national divisions. There is a small set of basic standards, mainly related to business processes (for example, credit policy), and the rest of the approach to “doing business” is determined by local management independently. Most of the tasks in the company are set in the format "how would we achieve the result X", instead of the usual "we need to do A, B, C, so that everything becomes good." When there are no common standards, we invent our own, but only where they are needed.
Freedom - so what's wrong with it?
Freedom is the right of people to freely think, act and speak without hypocrisy "(c) JosĂ© MartĂ
Why is freedom so important to me personally? It seems to me that without freedom of action it is impossible to cultivate an honest responsibility within the company: any opinion, decision, idea can, with a high probability, pick up and kill someone from above. And gradually you stop to see the point in convincing these "other people." Freedom is not anarchy; in any case, you exist within the system. But free systems differ from those regulated by the volume and number of obstacles that an employee encounters on the way to achieving the goal.
Want examples? I have them.
How we implemented CI / CD
Without long preludes - a couple of guys (not top managers at all) went to the DevOps Days conference in the USA, got charged with ideas, brought them to the bank, briefly spoke to the management, and after that a campaign of one and a half years began. It was necessary to choose a stack of tools, somehow introduce new ideas into the company's culture, make friends of the team and at the same time not lose good established techniques. As a result, a CI / CD pipeline was built for most of the applications developed in the bank (we’ll tell you about this in the near future, or maybe we’ll get together and make an open meeting). At the same time, no project was registered, the steering committee was not collected, no charts were built, dozens of approvals were not carried out. They played everything according to the principle of a classic venture: they believed in the children, allocated funding and released them. As a result, we got a motivated team, burning with the idea and free from bureaucracy.
More examples?
Who are the banks in the last year or two tried to introduce the role of Scrum-masters? You know what kind of hyip is in the country now on this topic? Suddenly, everyone guessed that Scrum-masters should still be selected, and no, our developer Petr will not be able to earn money as a Scrum-master in his spare time. Companies finally realized that this role was valuable, and everyone sharply rushed to look for people. Not the simplest story, judging by what is heard at conferences and forums. Basically, either companies are trying to give the Scrum-masters money for unreal money, or they buy them “as a service” from a couple of well-known companies.
What did it look like with us? One of the colleagues (“product manager” in the terminology at the time), who was once a Scrum master in his life, came to the management and asked for funding for the experiment: to make his school of Scrum masters and recruit young people with a suitable profile (we were interested in psychological education) and lack of experience in banks and knowledge in Scrum. He did not draw a single slide to sell this idea. The principle of "okay, try, if anything, you can quickly jump off." The “funnel of recruitment” was organized fairly quickly; as a result, out of several dozen sufferers, we still have 9 “schoolchildren”. The training itself was also organized in a cool way - not a boring set of trainings, but gamified lessons. We will tell you about it in detail.
After three months, we received the first group of trained Scrum Masters who are really useful for teams.
Well, another example, from a completely different field: a year and a half ago, the word “fintech” in Raiffeisenbank was known only to a couple or three of the curious. In reality, we had no relations with the Fintech startups market. At some point in the company decided to look at the market as a whole, and to some startups individually. One of our colleagues became interested in this topic and almost single-handedly dragged us into a get-together of innovation banks. Last year alone we conducted 11 pilots with FINTECH start-ups, learned to integrate them into our complex world and test their hypotheses in just 3 months. But most importantly, this girl was able to incite interest in fintech among all representatives of the banking business.
Why us?
I can throw these examples for a long time, but the bottom line is this: there is enough freedom in our IT department to create and create unusual solutions without hitting the hard boundaries of standards and bureaucracy.
And yes, we can have lunch for more than one hour, we don’t come to work at 9, walk in casual style and even with multi-colored hair, but we value the team and the good mood of our employees much more than anything else.
I happened to work in different companies. And in tech fashionable youth, including. Everyone had something cool. In each one could learn something. But this level of freedom, as in Rife, I have not seen anywhere else.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/341250/
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