Allianz Technology is the internal shared services provider for Allianz Group. The Allianz Technology vision is to transform Allianz into a digital group. Digitalization is about providing a resilient, secure and efficient infrastructure backbone as well as ensuring that new technologies and new channels are leveraged to design, distribute and service Allianz products.

RBS Consult is a privately held, boutique IT infrastructure management and consultancy firm. It specializes in building, deploying and managing private cloud-based complex solutions. These solutions are custom-tailored to meet the clients’ security, availability and data confidentiality needs. As a Founder and Managing Director of RBS Consult I was ultimately responsible for envisioning, funding, building, growing, and sustaining the company. I had an idea of building an advanced technology firm that would make bleeding edge innovative infrastructural solutions accessible to small and medium-sized companies and turned this idea into a successful business. I got a chance to wear many new hats and gain vast business experience in all key areas of operating a professional services firm:● Designing and implementing a proper legal and organizational structure addressing specialized security concerns by separation of asset ownership, financial and service contract management, operations and technical support compartmentalization, internal audit and oversight management. It was successfully implemented within several legal entities in BVI, UK and Russia.● Technical solution design, testing, operational deployment, subsequent evolution and adaptation to the needs of our clients● Managing sales, marketing, branding and partnerships● Account management and delivery assurance for all our clients and projects● Building and growing technical support team and back-end engineering operations, using clear process metrics and implementing automation tools● Building and growing internal knowledge base and best practices● Managing vendor relationships and the entire process of equipment, software and services procurement in the UK and Russia● Design and implementation of processes and tools for internal oversight● Recruiting, training, motivating, coaching and mentoring key team members

As an interim COO and CIO, working in tandem with the founder and CEO of the company, I was challenged by the new board to clear the operational runway and to restructure the company’s efforts by shifting its focus to expanding into the US travel market. Within 10 months I:● defined a few clear strategic goals for the company and refocused the company’s development efforts on incremental and iterative planning/execution● inventoried, structured and triaged all flaccid, active and planned initiatives, formed a project portfolio, cleaned the operational runway by closing projects that did not fit with our strategic objectives, stopped efforts that were not adequately resourced, reduced project multitasking to avoid thrashing, removed people who were not fit to do their jobs, stopped relationships with contractors who were not delivering on their promises● launched an R&D division to develop a brand new mobile application, the first version of the which explored a completely new paradigm of booking and was fully-integrated with the existing backend within 3 months of the initial project launch● rebuilt the management team so that each member would have a clear area of focus and responsibilities, nourished the development of new working relationships and facilitated the transition of responsibilities to new management team members● rebuilt and substantially expanded the entire IT team by implementing a hybrid Scrum/XP/Kanban-based delivery process, defined the role of a Product Owner with clear rules of engagement with business stakeholders; introduced product discovery/elaboration/analysis practices as well as quality management and delivery assurance practices● facilitated adoption of the processes of customer development and business model discovery based on the principles of Lean Startup and Agile product development; defined and successfully executed the first cycle of build-measure-learn loop with product re-launch in Paris for the US-based customers

My key objective was to prepare the company for an IPO on London’s Stock Exchange by transforming its homegrown IT mess into the world-class IT ecosystem. Having over $1 billion in managed assets and the annual growth rate of over 100%, the company had no intention of slowing down to make room for the necessary reorganization. Its IT systems were chaotic, the in-house bespoke ERP solution constantly crashed and had critical bugs affecting the company’s ability to service clients and manage portfolio risks.In 15 months I managed to build the IT structure of the company almost from scratch:● Lead the IT Operations and Infrastructure reengineering program that completed a pilot solution that allowed us to restore critical business continuity within 60 minutes - for cases involving the loss of critical equipment and/or services by consolidating all IT systems within a private cloud-based solution in a European datacenter.● Built an Agile Project Management Office that dramatically improved transparency, predictability and completion ratios of organisational initiatives and enabled our transition to properly chartered, planned, and executed projects.● Built Business Analysis, Quality Assurance and Continuous Delivery practices that allowed us to move from “pray this will work in prod” to “no critical defects in any build” stage, as well as significantly improved transparency, predictability, built trust with business stakeholders.● Completely rebuilt the Development team to adopt key Agile engineering and planning practices as well as coached it to gradually take full ownership of that iterative hybrid Scrum/XP/Lean process. Those efforts allowed us to go from chaos to consistently delivering high-quality product increments every two weeks with the median cycle time for an average feature of 3 weeks. We moved from putting out fires at frantic pace to predictably executing planned and prioritized work with direct involvement of key business stakeholders.

ThoughtWorks is the privately held global firm that pioneered enterprise-scale agile software delivery. Established in 1993, with over 3000 employees across 13 countries, ThoughtWorks provides agile transformation and digital product innovation and delivery to Global 500 market disruptors with ambitious missions.I had an opportunity to wear many different hats, apply various management styles, aggressively learn with every engagement something new and apply my knowledge and skills to help marquee customers of TW to build innovative products while adopting Agile development and delivery practices. Key areas of focus and main responsibilities were: ● Program chartering and governance ● Agile Maturity and capability assessment and guided Agile transformation ● Scaled Enterprise Agile adoption management ● Customer Project Management Office integration ● Project portfolio and program management ● Project team management ● Managing project sponsors and key stakeholders ● Agile Coaching and mentoring with focus on deliberate team learning and adoption of engineering and management practices ● Agile Software Development methods implementation (Extreme Programming/Scrum)Full project life cycle management (project chartering and initiation, release planning, iteration planning and execution, analysis/QA/development/UAT/deployment and post-production maintenance work)

I have always been passionate about technology and applying the cutting edge solutions and methods to build challenging and innovative products. ThoughtWorks always had a knack for attracting some of the smartest technologists and then challenging them to solve tough problems. Working with such teams allowed me to rapidly build deep and diverse expertise in many areas: ● Business processes modelling, optimisation and automation strategy ● Information Systems architectural analysis, design and evolution ● Development and execution of system integration strategies ● Emergent Software prototyping, designing and refactoring ● Technical team leadership and active coaching/mentoring for geographically distributed development teams ● Software development, test automation, implementation of a continuous delivery (code-to-production) pipeline (Java, C#, Ruby)