Q1 2020

6 EU BUSINESS NEWS / Q1 2020 , Check and Mate For Chess Grandmaster Dmitri Bountsman, everything is a little bit like a game. To get the most out of something, youmust first understand the rules. Once the rules are understood, it’s possible to accomplish the truly exceptional. Now, Dmitri is the worthy winner of EU Business News’ award for Software Architecture Expert of the Year 2019. In the light of this astonishing achievement, we took a closer look at the man and the business to see what made both such amazing examples of success. Based in Stuttgart, Germany, Dmitri Bountsman has an incredible history that informs his approach to business today. Born in the ex-Soviet Union, his family moved to Germany when he was nine years old. In a new country with a new language to learn and new cultural norms to process, it was learning and loving chess that allowed him to overcome language barriers while teaching him a new skill. Excelling here set the precedent for his success later on, and he grew into an International Grand Master with a new perspective on life and success. The study of IT, software development and architecture followed this triumph, and proved to be an area in which he could also excel. It was not long before he was able to take a leading role, guiding the entire software architecture in a project that required 960,000 man-hours to complete. This involved creating not only a viable ecosystem, but the solutions that would allow the organisation to grow and thrive. As a specialist in the topic, we asked Dmitri what led him down this path and what guided him forward to excellence. “Any company that I worked with, the same problems were always present,” he explained. “I speak about companies where IT is not the primary business. There are of course technical issues, but there are also communications and mindset problems on different levels. Often the IT is seen as a kind of “necessary evil” and software developers as coders.” For Dmitri, therefore, the need is not to deliver the perfect solution to a problem, but to encourage a change in perspective that would enable each team member to perform at their best. Nov19574 “I decided to help companies gain control over IT, keep it, save a lot of money and accelerate their business growth,” Dmitri told us. “My goal is to change IT from “necessary evil”, to a strength that makes the difference. I work with companies that do not see IT as their primary business, but have a minimum of one hundred employees. Both the company and its employees benefit in more ways than one. The senior management will get control of IT costs and schedule of changes of future development. The specialist departments will finally see results instead of hearing ‘that’s not possible’. The software development will have more fun developing new features instead of being upset about never-ending meetings without results.” To achieve these exceptional results, Dmitri takes a bespoke approach that draws not only on his incredible ability to analyse and problem- solve quickly, but means that he is able to solve the problems that are present as opposed to a standardised solution. We asked if he could tell us more about this strategy in his own words: “I come into my client’s organization as part of the team, and depending on the organization’s size, I spent between three and fifteen days to analyse the situation and find out what can be improved and where the problems are.” This opens the opportunity for Dmitri to provide a variety of packages, each offering a different solution to the same problem. The first package involves Dmitri coming into a situation, resolving the problems that have arisen, running some workshops to handle the problem then handing the results over to the business to do with as they wish. The second is much the same as the first, but instead of leaving, Dmitri is invited to stay and consult