Nikolay Milenkov

The shift to Agile mindset is the story of our journey to becoming Agile, SAFe not only in the way we work but also in the way we think. For us in Commerzbank DTC Sofia it was important not only to DO Agile but to BE Agile. In order to be successful in this challenging mission we needed to work at a whole new level where organizational culture meets the Agile mindset. This is a story of how we have changed the way we work by changing the way we think.

We know how difficult change is and how resistant people could be to it. But we did it! We walked the long way from the traditional working methods to the new Agile way, where we have slowly become self-organized, independent teams with a lower need of management approvals for each decision we were to make.

In addition to “The shift to Agile mindset” talk, you will hear a story about a newly formed team and its way to becoming Agile and diving into developing a product with neither previous technical knowledge, nor experience in working with Scrum and Agile. This part of the story will tell you how we have evolved from a group of individuals into a highly performing team and how our people overcame the challenges of the unknown, navigating in a volatile environment with lots of dependencies, and successfully applying two of the main Agile values and principles: “responding to change over following a plan” and “build projects around motivated individuals”.