Sberbank of Russia : Sber holds first online conference on Agile at Sber

Sber has hosted the first online conference Sbergile Talks, where it unveiled the details of one of the world's largest agile transformations to over 10,000 event participants. The business program covered three topics: Organization, Product, and Team. At the end of the first day, renowned industry expert Dave Snowden, the creator of the Cynefin framework, delivered a presentation. On the second day, the participants practiced their skills during workshops.

The event was inaugurated by David Rafalovsky, CTO of Sberbank Group, Executive Vice President, Head of Technology. He emphasized that Agile had become an indispensable tool to accelerate Sber dramatically, and speed is key to achieving your strategic goals.

Ksenia Yashina, Senior Managing Director, Director of Office for Agile Transformation and Adoption of Change Instruments at Sber, spoke about the evolution of Sbergile from 1.0 to 4.0, the achieved results, the strategy behind framework development, and short-term plans.

Other issues that were discussed included the production process and the availability of a single development environment with a wide range of tools and services; planning for distributed teams; building a transparent system for monitoring, internal motivation, and leadership. The speakers shared their practical experience and spoke of how you can learn to understand the organization and not miss the time for changes.

The presentation by Anton Savelyev, Executive Director of the Agile as a Service Center, was of particular interest. Anton confirmed that Sber was ready to share expertise and help any company carry out an agile transformation. To this end, Sbergile as a Service was launched. It's a unique offering, letting companies enjoy consultations with Sber experts who advise businesses on the entire range of issues regarding the application of agile practices, from teaching the basics to carrying out a full-fledged turnkey transformation.

The Product part of the conference was entirely devoted to how Sber creates the infrastructure for experiments, the process of continuous development of product managers and new value for customers, how the customer experience management system is being built and CX research is being embedded into the product life cycle.

In the Team part of the conference, the main change agents - agile coaches and scrum masters - unveiled the details of the best way to set up team interactions, track dependencies, and build processes.

Interest in Sbergile Talks, lively debate in the conference chart, and a stream of questions to each speaker have confirmed our hypothesis - the market is ready for change. This inspires and gives confidence that we will overcome the crisis caused by the pandemic and macroeconomic factors with dignity. Moreover, Sbergile Talks 2020 has taken its rightful place among the largest national conferences on Agile this year, and we hope that it will be a permanent place where you can meet with leaders of change and will emerge as a communication catalyst for the entire agile community.

Ksenia Yashina

Senior Managing Director, Director of Office for Agile Transformation and Adoption of Change Instruments at Sber