Agile Practices for Creating the RnD Culture in a 65 Year Old State-Owned Bank

How any incumbent bank can put the right Agile practices at its core and this gets you promoted 3 times in 3 years?

I had the opportunity to work in a corporate state-owned bank for 5 years between 2016–2020. I caught up the last 2 years of the transition from mainframe to open systems, which started 4 years before me. It was successfully completed in 2017.

While digital transformation was the hot topic for all companies, a suitable ground also was formed for our story.

We needed to accelerate in Agile processes, trending technologies and RnD to catch up with the private-sector banks that we lagged behind.

About Company:

VBank — A government bank with

• 20k staff,
• 850+ IT staff,
• 900+ Branches,
• 4k ATMs

donquixotenovel.com

Challenge the Status Quo

It needs hard work to build something in such a company. Usually, you have to challenge with the status quo. Everyone knows that the first 3 months are very important to show your style and make a positive impact. I would recommend and gift the book First 90 Days, by Michael Watkins to my friends who are new managers.

Sometimes it feels like being Don Quixote. You usually find yourself on your own 🙂 It’s up to you to create the story, you have to convince your teammates and the people you want to hire so that they can join you and fight.

It is necessary to evaluate the situation well when passing from the private sector to the state-owned company. The risk you take here that is the possibility of producing nothing. When your new teammates feel this, they immediately start looking for another job. You will also damage your own reputation in your career, have difficulty in moving to the next job, and you will not be able to find anyone to come with you.

Your native co-workers often try to stick to the status quo, and if you’re challenging for a change, you’re usually the one to be ignored.

Choosing and forming your team is usually not possible. You have to work with people chosen by others who mostly are not willing to work much. If you have dreams, you have to continue with a part of them who believes in you.

While a group of status quo members aim to earn a salary by working less, you are in a different group living in that institution just because you are hardworking. This is not only a situation for state-owned companies, but also applies to private companies. However, this unfair situation can cause psychological problems for your team.

Your VP and Executive Board members must support you, otherwise don’t bother, it’s waste of time. In the first years, our executive committee expected corporate development and did their best to provide the appropriate conditions. If you don’t have these conditions and support of board, don’t hurt their careers by keeping good people by your side.

• If a playground is opened and you can walk, then open new lanes.
• Identify the chronic problems of the company.
• Discover trending areas where no one in the organization has entered.
• Then put the pieces together and come up with a strategy.
• Identify required teams.
• Tell your story and convince.
• Point the target so they can run.

Focus on your business, as far as it goes 🙂

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. — Mahatma Gandhi

What I did?

My goal was to ensure that the VBank acquires the capabilities and new technologies to operate like the private sector, and to make it the most private of the state-owned. Trends were pointing to the Digital Transformation for those years (2016–2020) and describing new concepts such as paperless banking, mobile and tablet applications, data analytics, UX/CX.

We built all..

The first team in my responsibility was Mobile Banking Application Development Team. We increased the staff of 6 people to 15 people in a year and were the first team to apply Agile processes successfully in the company.

The first thing I did was to make the current situation visible and apply Agile practices. We started to follow our work list and problems with a backlog. We started running sprints with post-its on a physical blackboard so that the team could feel the agile principles more clearly.

We were also practicing daily meetings and retrospectives. After a few sprints we fixed the performance issues of the mobile app that crashed on the salary payment date, 15th of every month. Being able to build a team, fast production and performance success brought me a promotion in a year. I became the software infrastructure team manager of 32 people.

My new task was the infrastructure of all banking applications. I set up the DevOps and UX teams. I brought Elastic Search and NoSQL Database capabilities to the company. We started web-based tablet banking activities. Most importantly, we ensured the establishment of the RnD Department. I was promoted to the role of Director of RnD and Business Intelligence in a short time.

I have the privilege to set-up the first AI & Data science team of VBank. We completed 25 Machine Learning tasks within 9 months and got incentives, model patents from the science academy.

Also we have done the first Hackathon of both VBank and all state-owned banks.

A brief summary of these achievements:

Research and Development (Completed)

• Voice Assistant — VIBI
• Open Banking
• Contactless payment
• Identity reading infrastructure
• Digital confirmation with a front desk tablet
• Tubitak Science Academy incentives
• EU Horizon project acceptance

Research and Development (MVP & InProgress)

• Voice recognition
• Face recognition
• Customer Experience Infrastructure
• Tablet Banking

Data Analytics (Completed)

• Data Analytics Team
• Data Governance

Quality Assurance & DevOps (Completed)

• 15th of the month Mobile issues
• QA and Test Automation Team and STLC
• DevOps Team

Academy and Organization (Completed)

• Agile Transformation
• Demand/Project Manager Training Program
• Hackathon

Software Infrastructure (Completed)

• Web Framework
• Establishment of Elastic Search infrastructure
• NoSQL Database Architecture
• Identity reading infrastructure

How did it end up?

I have worked with 3 General Managers, 3 Assistant General Managers and 11 Directors who have changed in 5 years. 6 of them left while I was working, and I was the seventh to leave.

My story ended there with 3 promotions in 3 years. By 2020, one of my partner consultants asked me: “Why are you still here?”

When no one supports it, it’s time to go. Otherwise you truly become Don Quixote.

You get this signal when resources that are precious to you are cut off. They try to fire someone from your team, cut your research resources or your budget. At such times, resisting is a waste of time, it may be better to seek different adventures, in other words, to change jobs. None of us have time to waste.

It was time to add a new one to the list of companies that lasted for an average of 4 years in my career and move on to the 5th company. With one difference, an international ScaleUp with a board of directors instead of corporate structures could have created more opportunities that suited me better. So our great ScaleUp, the SM Adventure began😉Follow my new stories on Medium.