Jelena Laketić

Hello. Hi, everybody. It feels really weird to be here at this time, at the end of the second day.

Personally, for me, this was the first DevOps Summit, and I've seen some amazing speakers, amazing stories, where I can only hope that you have a little bit of energy to keep your attention for the next half an hour and my story.

So I will be telling you about the last 12 years of my professional life and about injecting Agile and DevOps. And I feel that "injecting" is actually very appropriate here, because it's not the process that is really pleasant for the person that is giving injections and for the person that is receiving.

On the other hand, it is very important to have a certain dose of giving so that you don't kill the patient. And in this case, the patient and somebody who we are trying to keep healthy is the organization, and that's never easy.

So before actually going into my story, let me tell you a bit about myself.

My name is Jelena Laketić, as you can see here. And in my current role, as Gene said, I'm head of Asset Management SWAT, which is not a military team, even though it feels sometimes like one. It's a Software Action Team.

I've been in this current role for the last two years. In my previous role, I was for 10 years, and so I had multiple roles over time. I was responsible for a group of trading applications. And if you can imagine, when you do that for 10 years, your role grows and changes. So I ended up, at the end, being a product owner, a team lead, and senior software engineer.

So altogether, I've been at UBS since 2006, which is quite a long time, but for me, it really felt that it was shorter. And I guess when you have fun, then it seems like time just flies.

In addition, I have many additional roles. What I really appreciated in the company like UBS is, and with my bosses, they somehow really supported all of my crazy ideas.

So since 2014 until today, I've been co-leading the UBS global hackathon, hackathon that is happening across four regions and on 15 locations. And I've been also responsible for Switzerland and EMEA region.

Also, because the subject about women in technology is very important for me, and in Switzerland it is one of the biggest cultural changes, I've been actually in a core team of women in technology. And I've been also leading the external community, which means I'm trying to bring as many women, age from 11 till older, I try to excite them about the technology. And then once they are old enough, to bring them to UBS. To be perfectly honest, if I can just excite them about technology, that's good enough for me if they join any other company.

Before UBS, I had six years of software engineering across different industries, mostly in Switzerland. And I need to mention my hobbies because this is what I think is keeping me sane. I do also work hard even for my hobbies. I love traveling and music, but I also have a radio show, and this is something that keeps me very busy and on my toes.

On the other hand, it actually brings a certain different aspect and contact with a different kind of industry, which I think makes me better in my current job.

To give you a little bit more information about UBS. UBS is one of the largest banks. We're very old. Not as old as some banks that were presenting today here and yesterday, but still quite old, more than 150 years. And we're actually offering the financial advice to wealthy institutional and corporate clients worldwide, as well as the private clients in Switzerland.

In order to actually satisfy our clients' needs, we have five divisions: Global Wealth Management, Asset Management, Investment Bank, Personal and Corporate, and Corporate Center. Corporate Center is where IT is, and this is essentially where I am as well.

To give you a bit of an idea how big UBS is, our workforce at glance is quite interesting. We are the largest bank in Switzerland, but we have a truly global footprint. There are 61,000 people in the company, and 34% of them are in the States, in America, 34 in Switzerland, 18 in EMEA, and 14 in Asia.

What is kind of an interesting fact, I don't have it here on the slide, is that we have 39% women and 61% men. So we're still working there to create a certain balance. We are speaking more than 150 languages, and we are actually present in 51 countries worldwide. Our headquarters is in Zurich, in Switzerland, and this is where I am, and this is where I've been living for the last 18 years.

So where do I sit, actually? Where is my place in UBS? As I mentioned, I'm a part of Corporate Center. In UBS, we call it IT Group Technology. And the way how it is, if you look at this complicated map, it's actually a matrix organization.

On one side, we're aligned with our businesses. On the other side, we have the functionalities that actually are across all the businesses, like CTO, infrastructure, and similar.

In the case of a SWAT team, I actually sit in Asset Management IT, Asset Management Technology. So here I am, which means that Asset Management business is who my clients are.

So to give you, I don't know how much you know about the banking, but previously, I was working in Investment Bank. When I was moving to Asset Management, I was trying to actually understand what is the difference between Investment Bank and Asset Management. And one thing that I found out and that helped me understand, and this is very simplified, what I'm going to say, but basically, Asset Management is about managing the money that companies and clients already have, while Investment Bank was more about raising the money that companies don't have but would like to have.

And this whole thing, actually, logic, makes Asset Management much more static than Investment Bank. So at the moment when I joined Asset Management, and transformation is still happening right now, I felt that Asset Management was maybe 10, 15 years behind the Investment Bank.

So there was a lot of work to do there. One of the main problems that I've seen was that Asset Management historically was built from several small organizations and very scattered everywhere, isolated teams. And on the other side, IT has been heavily outsourced, which means actually coming to the common goal and working toward the common goal was almost impossible.

So I was invited two years ago to help them achieve a more efficient organization. And with that invite, I also had a possibility to come up with a concept that I built based on my experiences before.

So in the case of a SWAT team, when somebody asks me, "What is the SWAT team?" I would say the SWAT team is a Software Action Team set to actually explore the possibilities of innovating and digitizing UBS Asset Management.

It is also there to catalyze the transformation from these huge, complex applications to smaller-scale and lower-cost applications by using design thinking meets Agile and DevOps practices. And all of that should enable UBS Asset Management to actually achieve some competitive advantage in an industry, because smaller asset management companies have been doing that already for a while.

So how can SWAT do that?

Again, when I was coming up with this concept, I was actually trying to identify what are the pillars of the work of the SWAT team. One of the most important ones for me was the applied innovation pillar.

What that means is actually that we are trying to deliver production-ready products in close collaboration with business, our clients, using design thinking approach, meaning really work with them toward the solution and iterate as many times as we need to, to create something that they will be happy to use.

And of course, in order to achieve that, using Agile methodologies and DevOps practices just made really sense. In addition, I also wanted for my team to have a possibility to explore new technologies, because Asset Management, in the state as it is, relies on a lot of legacy applications that are, frankly speaking, out of date, especially regarding technology.

So the idea was to actually assess what we could be using where, and of course, with all of these methodologies, in a better way. But also creating the production-ready products meant that all these new technologies and these products that we create in the environment that it's easier to create, moving them into the production would actually enable us to assess what are the efforts that we need to invest to create really the better technology organization, Asset Management, a better technology organization.

So the next pillar that I also find important is, in order to do that, we obviously need people, and working together with the IT is something that I was very much interested in and was very important to me.

I didn't really want to create the team that is arrogant and totally excluded from the rest of the IT. I actually was that regular IT for so many years, and I wanted to create the team that will complement the IT, that will actually help them, empower them, teach them better ways of working, new technology.

So the idea was, every time when we create the product, we should be delivering it to regular IT, and through that handover process, we would teach them about the technology that we use, the ways that we use, and we will empower them and therefore enable, as I call it, bottom-up innovation.

Not just me, but everybody else. But in this pillar, that was a very important aspect for me. Obviously, for a team like SWAT to exist, top-down innovation was there.

However, during all the years working at UBS and in my software engineering experience, I realized that top-down innovation doesn't really matter if it's not supported with bottom-up innovation. So this way, I would find and identify allies across the organization and help them actually be creative and be better, and therefore create altogether, or inject, maybe a spirit of potentially better organization.

Because transformation takes time, and you need the people on board that are motivated and happy to jump on that train of the transformation.

In addition, obviously, trying to increase the key talent that we have in the organization was very important. Being a heavily outsourced organization, there is not so much permanent staff that we could rely on to actually achieve this pillar. So my team was also helping in interviewing people and actually connecting and bringing people that they meet at conferences, just good people to have around, good developers, we were bringing to this organization.

In addition to these two pillars, the third one was a more global one. At UBS, we have innovation on a global level, and while this is really great because we do get the possibility to explore certain innovative ideas, the problem that I've seen with this way was that in many ways what would happen, there would be some kind of funding that would be then assigned to the external vendor, and then they will have all the fun working on innovative projects instead of our IT.

So the idea here was to actually help the Global Innovation Board, as we call it, to rely more and keep the knowledge about interesting projects and innovative technology inside of the bank. And we were helping them actually, not just working on the project, but just think about the concepts, aligning them with a team that exists across the organization and involving them in a certain innovation project that had already good funding and interesting subjects.

This one was actually a pillar that right now is only on the level of Asset Management, but the idea is to continue that also on the global level.

SWAT team is at the moment a very small team, and that is the whole idea, starting it with a smaller-scale team and then maybe rebuilding it in a similar way across the organization would be the ideal plan. So at the moment, I have four high-performing IT specialists, full-stack developers, and one UX expert who is very important in our work with the business clients.

No matter what their roles are, what I was looking for are the people with a little bit of a fresh mind outside of actually UBS, if possible. Usually students, young people with a growth mindset, because I wanted to have people that are open to learn new technology, adapt to the ways, be able to work with a different type of people, just somebody who is very flexible and open. Of course, ideally, they would be interested in innovative subjects and new technologies and methodologies and best practices.

So to add to this, what is important also to note is that there are some points that enable this kind of a team.

Now, I already mentioned that outside of the team, what is very much important is this top-down support, senior management support. And in this case, we are having support from a mixed business and IT, which actually enables the team like this to be aligned with the overall strategy of the organization.

Obviously, what is also important is that we are able to work closely with our clients, in this case UBS Asset Management business. Of course, by choosing the people that are adaptable and flexible, this would be easily possible.

Internally, I was trying to build a more startup-like culture. We work with the open space. We have regular talks. We discuss anything from technology to tasks related to projects, but also things that we've read about, and we always discuss how we could use it actually in our work.

But what is also important is that there are clear tasks and goals, and that everybody in the team is capable of jumping in to either a task from their colleagues or to something that comes up out of nowhere, and without being too strict about their goals and tasks. This is a kind of an agile way of the Agile, I would say.

Of course, for doing all of this, we're using Agile methodology. In this case, we chose the whole Atlassian package and DevOps practices. We're working with cloud technology, and my team at the moment wrote all the build scripts and deployment scripts, and this is how we are working at this point.

This will obviously develop later on in a more optimized way, but since the team is still new, we're keeping it on this level.

What is really important, actually, that we have internally and that enables the team to be very creative is so-called adapted sandbox technical setup. What I mean by that is that I came up with an external infrastructure setup that is quite simple. It's not something that is mind-blowing, but it's actually the setup that allows the people to join the team and immediately, the day after, start coding.

Just to give you a comparison, what we have at UBS is when the developer joins the organization, it takes us up to three weeks to actually start coding. So in this way, with this sandbox approach, we have external machines, and we are running them on a secure network, and therefore we are still secure, but very easy and flexible to do what we need to do from the work for our clients or to explore a new technology.

So this is a story about my current role. However, I want to actually go a little bit back in time, and hopefully I will have enough time, and walk you through things that inspired me to create some of the concepts that I mentioned for the SWAT.

Also, obviously, what I was telling you now, it's very much in a nutshell, because there is not much time. So I'm trying to squeeze as much as I can in the 30 minutes.

So I'm going to throw back to 2006 and how did it all start. I joined UBS in 2006. I joined UBS Investment Bank as a software engineer. I was a bit of an experiment for the Investment Bank at that time. They were doing very well, and they just hired the team to rewrite all trading application systems that we had.

So they wanted to find somebody with a different mind, and I wasn't the typical person that would be hired in a bank because I worked in a different industry. And I remember when I was headhunted by UBS, I wasn't really interested. I didn't think there is anything for me to do in a bank. I thought the bank-related work for IT is really boring.

But then I did a bit of research, and I figured out that UBS Investment Bank is slightly different. They were working on some projects with university, and I thought I'd give it a try.

What really made me agree to work for them was when I met a team of old guys. They were the guys that developed the first electronic trading system, and they were almost before their retirement, so they were 55 and older.

And I start talking to them about their work, and they had this sparkle in their eye. They were so excited still about their work. And that was really, for me, breaking point, because I thought if these guys are still excited to work, and they've been there for more than 20 years, then this is a place for me.

So I decided to join the team that was developing high-speed electronic system. I started with a team that developed the first electronic trading system. They did that back in the '90s. And this bunch of guys were actually amazing developers, and really, they knew the business in its core.

And then I moved to the new team that was supposed to rewrite that system, and we were not doing the big bang. We were actually working with the guys into creating something that uses the new technology, but still relying on all the business logic and efforts of the previous team.

So before UBS, in all the companies where I worked, we worked with a waterfall model, release frequency of every three months. And frankly speaking, I was always bored. I would come up with so many crazy things and inventions. I remember at Siemens, I came up with improvement of QA system because I just really didn't know what to do with myself while waiting for the next project to start.

Now, here at UBS, my team was actually working differently. And this is something that really amazed me. I didn't experience that before. So they had a waterfall model, but it felt like it was more flexible. Their release frequency was actually less than three months, and they worked closely with QA team and support and ops team.

And they were more dynamic to what I used to before. However, they were still not fully efficient. But one of the breaking points, and something that I would say there is always a silver lining in everything, was probably in 2007 when subprime mortgage crisis happened.

So I joined the organization that was super happy. They even had the money to spend on resources like me. And then I joined in December of 2006, and 2007 started, and guess what? UBS was actually the first Wall Street company who declared the biggest loss. Until 2008, we lost more than 50 billion. We had 11,000 job cuts, and it was a bit of a bloodbath, I have to say.

There was an ambulance every other day in our offices helping people recover from some stress. Frankly speaking, it was a bit horrible.

In addition, end of 2008, we were bailed by Swiss National Bank. Now, this sounds like a very good thing, but what this created is that basically our reputation in Switzerland went down the drain. Everybody were against us. Daily when we left the offices, we had people throwing eggs at us. It was a really horrible situation.

Now, for me, I really have to say I felt a bit at home. Maybe it's due to my background. I'm coming from ex-Yugoslavia, and I lived there till 2000. So having a little bit drama and chaos around was something I was very much used to it.

So while other people were feeling uncomfortable and they couldn't handle it, I actually felt reasonably okay. And so I decided to stay. So me and like-minded people, my team, the people that really stayed were people really that were working together and wanted to continue doing the good things.

So in all of this, how did this whole situation affect my team?

So my team were a group of developers, but we got even closer now with the support and ops and the QA. And what we needed to do, we needed to continuously develop new features while fixing bugs. We needed to have a shorter release cycle. We needed to do this with a good quality and also make sure that everything that we deliver doesn't jeopardize the old features.

On the other hand, our clients also had to change. So our clients, front, middle, and back office, and these are some of the really tough guys, especially front office. You actually don't want to be in a room when something is not working because there's swear words flying around, and you have to be quite tough to handle that.

But these guys also had to change. They were not anymore stars that were bringing millions to the bank. So they start working closely with us, explaining to us what could we do better or how we can help them fix their pain points. They had to share the business knowledge with us so that we can do this properly.

When they had an issue, they had to report it with enough details for us to actually be able to fix it. And finally, they had to really trust us that we are the technical expert and that we can actually provide for them the best possible solution.

So all of that obviously resulted in us absolutely embracing Agile style of work and DevOps practices. Now, when I say this, in the time when we were embracing them, we didn't call them like this. We were just working more efficient, more organized, more together. We were just doing something in a very natural way. Only later on, we figured it out how this is called that we were using.

And over the time, we actually perfected the way. In the beginning, we were very manual, and later on, we started developing the tools. The ops guys would develop the tools for release, approval, and so on. We were really on every way over the next 10 years, that's how long I was at this position, we kind of perfected that way.

So what happened, and there are many stories that I can tell you, already now I'm very short with the time, and there will be probably no time. If anyone wants to hear some of the stories, please come after.

But what actually this created is that we start having a reputation of the team that was getting things done. We were smaller than ever because all the people that couldn't handle the pressure actually left, or they were made redundant, as one would expect. But we stayed, and we actually delivered in a most efficient way we could.

So what happened at that time is that across the organization, people started recognizing our standard as a golden standard, and they wanted to learn more about us. And so somehow we got even the name the Topaz way, Topaz being the application that we were developing.

So this was all great, and I really loved working in this team. However, when I got an offer to make the difference in another part of organization that was actually 15 years like we used to be 15 years before, I jumped on that opportunity, and I used many of the things that I learned and observed with my team in my current job.

Now, there is one more throwback that was also important for me and for my current role and current concept, and this is actually a hackathon.

So why was I chosen to run a hackathon? Gene actually asked me to come up with answer on this question. This is not very easy. I have no idea why somebody would choose me to run hackathon. So I had to call my ex-boss and ask him actually to help me with this.

And I came up with several points here. My passion for technology and innovation, my belief in UBS IT, its excellence and skills. And this is something that got me in trouble many times because there were many senior management meetings where I would step in and say, "We are really cool, and you don't know what you're talking about."

Also, I've been known for not being politically correct, but I always stand for what I believe, and I guess this is what they needed when they needed somebody to push this inside of the bank.

Also, I did lots of volunteering work, and I organized many events that were quite successful, so they knew that I would be able to pull the event like this.

And I think this is probably the most important: I had a reputation for being very resourceful and motivated if I'm passionate about something. And something that my colleague told me once when I asked them, "But I'm not sure if I can do that." They told me, "You, you get the sh... done." So I'm going to be a little bit correct there. And here, of course, in my presentation, due to our compliance, I have to say, "getting things done."

Now, why did I accept this role? I accepted this role exactly because of my belief in IT, knowing that we don't have sometimes time to work on great ideas, because we just have too many other things to do. So I wanted really to provide them with an opportunity to really unleash that innovative spirit, a platform where they could be for 24 hours, sleep on the premises of UBS, because what else would you like to do if not sleep where you work, and work together with the colleagues on prototyping of new ideas.

So looking at what we have today or looking at how hackathon started in 2014, we really started as an IT-focused event, because this is basically the idea that you could only sell IT at that time.

What we did, however, and I have to say, everybody thought we're crazy when we started this because bank having hackathon doesn't really make sense for many people. However, bank wasn't aware that at that time, we were already a technology company.

So what we did in the beginning was really smaller-scale event with the help of external vendor. But then over the time, we perfected this. And today, hackathons are actually all-division event. Everybody wants to take part. They're happening across four regions, and they're done only by internals.

And what is really important is that over the time, I also developed that adapted sandbox technical setup that I mentioned before, that I later on used in a SWAT team. And also I learned that what is really important is to keep the business on their place, meaning they can come up to IT and express their problems and what to solve, but essentially IT, and hackathon goers in this case, so people like IT people, should provide how to solve.

So that's my story. Thank you.