How Alfa-Bank lives during the period of changes and what we managed to do when combining IT development and Alfa-Lab
Hello!
My name is Dasha Ruslanova, I am the director of the Department of digital solutions at Alfa-Bank. Today I will tell you how we live during quite significant changes, what results in the process of this reformatting could be achieved in a year in terms of speed, and why do we need solution architects.
For the IT team, 2018 was a big challenge in terms of organizational changes, processes, and the penetration of engineering culture into business. And, of course, the scaling of the production process and the removal of the tense situation around conflicts in the development of frontal systems.
')
In order to increase speed, we needed not only to restructure processes related to hiring employees and working with vendors, but also to bring significant innovations to existing processes: continuous release technology, the so-called release train, a weekly, most automated process for delivering values ​​to a mobile application. Currently more than 20 teams are working on it. At the beginning of each week, a release candidate is automatically assembled and the release pipeline is launched.
What we wanted to come to: automate the assembly of applications and compiling descriptions of changes - to connect the "tickets" of the changes made by the developer in Git, and the description of the user story from the command board in jira, as well as to full transparency for clients and stakeholders. In the future plans to make all stages, except for manual acceptance testing, automatic, so that the release cycle becomes less than a week.
By the way, about transparency - we are actively introducing the practice of a “business partner”, the idea here is that our colleagues work in IT and at the same time represent the interests of business, observing the interests of each other, conventionally 50/50. Of course, this is an ideal situation and a reference balance, in practice everything is a little different, and outweighs one or the other side, but we strive for it. In such a situation, it turns out that colleagues are monitoring both the adequate filling of commands and their synchronization; They monitor both the quality of problem solving and the budget.
We went further and created the system “Rhythm of our production”, it allows you to see the current performance of teams, see the bottlenecks at the stages of evaluation and implementation, the status of selection and predictive load, and all this online
In the period from 2014 to 2017, we ended the year with about 900 solved problems. 2018 already finished with a mark of 940 tasks. Now, we conduct about 1,500 changes per month on the Bank’s platforms (that is, about 50 factors change every day). Such a speed is possible only in the presence of a flexible and evolutionary architecture.
As it was in the Alpha Laboratory
In 2016, we simultaneously had two approaches to the implementation of banking products - Labovsky and the classical IT approach. Labovsky was to legalize the architecture already on the fact of implementation, and often already when coordinating the implementation. Because of this, at times there were problems in the process of integrating all of this with applications that were non-core for Alpha Laboratories.
Classic IT worked according to the standard process:
It looks good, but as requirements change, this process becomes very long and inefficient.
Therefore, we decided to combine approaches, taking the best from each. The result was the service of solution architects.
These guys work on the basis of concepts established in the bank, and in close contact with teams and business units. This makes it possible, at the start of the project, to propose solutions combining both complete consistency with the architecture of the bank as a whole and efficiency in implementation. Due to this, the coordination of the architecture and the evaluation of the project now take about 1 week instead of 1 month according to the old scheme.
Nobody canceled the technology race - every two years there is a fairly significant update of the technology stack on the market, and this requires constant synchronization with the external IT-management. You need to be able to quickly introduce a new stack, prepare new specialists, and promptly conduct onboarding of new team members.
Therefore, we are now building a supporting environment for both work and command synchronization, trying to reuse components as much as possible. And this is also largely due to the solution-architects. Even in the absence of a special budget for the withdrawal of legacy systems, their work allowed us to exceed the expectations of the chief architect for this indicator by 20%.
Here I will note the main things that I keep learning from my team all the time.
Recognition of the results. This is an important part, the results should be recognized at the business level, it gives not only a feeling of a small holiday and the fact that you did everything correctly, but also additional synchronization: the stakeholder expected something specific from the development team - and she did it in full. Because in the development of working people for whom it is quite important to develop professionally and work precisely for the result. And it is difficult to do, if you see the result only, and he is not very much recognized elsewhere.
Fail fast, error analysis. Errors - a thing that must be quickly identified and must be discussed. At the level of the head of the stream or in general - business. Without embellishment to say what happened, what everyone thinks about it, and move on. Of course, sometimes there are conflicts on this ground that drag out, but over the course of a year we have learned how to hear each other and build on the value of the common cause, rather than on the emotions of each of us.
Total - we continue to expand the team, right now we have openly more than 30 vacancies for developers and architects. We managed to take the best practices of Alpha Laboratories, including those related to the speed of the supply of updates, and seamlessly integrate them into banking IT, eliminating possible conflicts between colleagues in the process of agreeing on certain decisions.
In addition, we continue to hold meetings for developers, designers and testers (you can follow the news here ).
And the day after tomorrow, our guys will hold a mitap for Atlassian fans in Yekaterinburg.
My name is Dasha Ruslanova, I am the director of the Department of digital solutions at Alfa-Bank. Today I will tell you how we live during quite significant changes, what results in the process of this reformatting could be achieved in a year in terms of speed, and why do we need solution architects.
For the IT team, 2018 was a big challenge in terms of organizational changes, processes, and the penetration of engineering culture into business. And, of course, the scaling of the production process and the removal of the tense situation around conflicts in the development of frontal systems.
')
In order to increase speed, we needed not only to restructure processes related to hiring employees and working with vendors, but also to bring significant innovations to existing processes: continuous release technology, the so-called release train, a weekly, most automated process for delivering values ​​to a mobile application. Currently more than 20 teams are working on it. At the beginning of each week, a release candidate is automatically assembled and the release pipeline is launched.
What we wanted to come to: automate the assembly of applications and compiling descriptions of changes - to connect the "tickets" of the changes made by the developer in Git, and the description of the user story from the command board in jira, as well as to full transparency for clients and stakeholders. In the future plans to make all stages, except for manual acceptance testing, automatic, so that the release cycle becomes less than a week.
By the way, about transparency - we are actively introducing the practice of a “business partner”, the idea here is that our colleagues work in IT and at the same time represent the interests of business, observing the interests of each other, conventionally 50/50. Of course, this is an ideal situation and a reference balance, in practice everything is a little different, and outweighs one or the other side, but we strive for it. In such a situation, it turns out that colleagues are monitoring both the adequate filling of commands and their synchronization; They monitor both the quality of problem solving and the budget.
We went further and created the system “Rhythm of our production”, it allows you to see the current performance of teams, see the bottlenecks at the stages of evaluation and implementation, the status of selection and predictive load, and all this online
Few numbers
In the period from 2014 to 2017, we ended the year with about 900 solved problems. 2018 already finished with a mark of 940 tasks. Now, we conduct about 1,500 changes per month on the Bank’s platforms (that is, about 50 factors change every day). Such a speed is possible only in the presence of a flexible and evolutionary architecture.
As it was in the Alpha Laboratory
In 2016, we simultaneously had two approaches to the implementation of banking products - Labovsky and the classical IT approach. Labovsky was to legalize the architecture already on the fact of implementation, and often already when coordinating the implementation. Because of this, at times there were problems in the process of integrating all of this with applications that were non-core for Alpha Laboratories.
Classic IT worked according to the standard process:
- Preparation of business requirements.
- Preparation and coordination of architecture.
- Implementation.
It looks good, but as requirements change, this process becomes very long and inefficient.
Therefore, we decided to combine approaches, taking the best from each. The result was the service of solution architects.
These guys work on the basis of concepts established in the bank, and in close contact with teams and business units. This makes it possible, at the start of the project, to propose solutions combining both complete consistency with the architecture of the bank as a whole and efficiency in implementation. Due to this, the coordination of the architecture and the evaluation of the project now take about 1 week instead of 1 month according to the old scheme.
Why is all this so important
Nobody canceled the technology race - every two years there is a fairly significant update of the technology stack on the market, and this requires constant synchronization with the external IT-management. You need to be able to quickly introduce a new stack, prepare new specialists, and promptly conduct onboarding of new team members.
Therefore, we are now building a supporting environment for both work and command synchronization, trying to reuse components as much as possible. And this is also largely due to the solution-architects. Even in the absence of a special budget for the withdrawal of legacy systems, their work allowed us to exceed the expectations of the chief architect for this indicator by 20%.
People and Culture
Here I will note the main things that I keep learning from my team all the time.
Recognition of the results. This is an important part, the results should be recognized at the business level, it gives not only a feeling of a small holiday and the fact that you did everything correctly, but also additional synchronization: the stakeholder expected something specific from the development team - and she did it in full. Because in the development of working people for whom it is quite important to develop professionally and work precisely for the result. And it is difficult to do, if you see the result only, and he is not very much recognized elsewhere.
Fail fast, error analysis. Errors - a thing that must be quickly identified and must be discussed. At the level of the head of the stream or in general - business. Without embellishment to say what happened, what everyone thinks about it, and move on. Of course, sometimes there are conflicts on this ground that drag out, but over the course of a year we have learned how to hear each other and build on the value of the common cause, rather than on the emotions of each of us.
Total - we continue to expand the team, right now we have openly more than 30 vacancies for developers and architects. We managed to take the best practices of Alpha Laboratories, including those related to the speed of the supply of updates, and seamlessly integrate them into banking IT, eliminating possible conflicts between colleagues in the process of agreeing on certain decisions.
In addition, we continue to hold meetings for developers, designers and testers (you can follow the news here ).
And the day after tomorrow, our guys will hold a mitap for Atlassian fans in Yekaterinburg.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/448276/
All Articles