Microsoft Solution Business Unit: Enterpreneurial Spirit in a Well-Organized Team

To make it possible, we divided our experts into flat business units giving each Vice President the freedom to decide how their department will look like, while our values remain the same. Today the Vice President of the Microsoft Solutions unit, Alexandr Sitnikov, told us the story of his unit, what distinguishes them, and why everyone who joins them stays for long.

Through challenges to success

In the distant 2006, I joined the Sigma Software team. From my first working day, I had the freedom to implement best practices and applied all my knowledge and previous development experience to our projects. At the same time, I was thrilled by the range of cutting-edge technologies our team was working with, and these technologically advanced solutions turned out to be my core challenge. Imagine the team of developers who create the programming language from the beginning or create solutions quite different from the existing ones.

When the company got scaled, the management team divided Sigma Software into separate units in order to keep the horizontal structure. Today our department unites more than 200 qualified Microsoft Stack professionals: .NET gurus; Full-Stack developers; DevOps engineers, Business Analytics, Project, Resource, Program Managers. We work with startups, product houses, and enterprises, which operate in numerous and versatile domains: automotive, aviation, document management, government and public sector, real estate and city infrastructure, intellectual property and logistics. The team works a lot with enterprise segment customers such as Volvo, SAS, and product houses such as Formpipe and Aareon providing the products and services that suit our clients the most.

Projects that we are proud of

I’m proud that within the unit my team has a chance to work with world-known clients that stay with us for years.

For example, since 2008, for Scandinavia’s leading enterprise content management system, we have been developing and supporting 8 ECM products among which are meetings application, long-term archive, cloud services, and others. With the help of our newest solutions, the system now is used by 5,000+ private and public companies in Denmark and Sweden.

Since 2010, we have been providing a product development team for a well-known provider of real estate and infrastructure management software (for example, car parking), which automates financial transactions (invoicing, payments), makes it possible to effectively plan and manage repairs, allows you to quickly find tenants, provides a convenient and quick way to process requests for malfunctions at facilities, etc. Now the client’s solution is widely used in Sweden, Norway, and Finland to manage over 10 million properties.

Also, we work with a range of US clients, one of them – a leading platform for automating IT workflows – is designed to make it easy and efficient for IT partners to migrate, backup, and manage their customers in the cloud. Over 20,000 IT partners in over 125 countries are accelerating their cloud businesses with this product. Helping IT providers be more successful in the cloud, they play an important role in the Microsoft services, and our team is happy to assist them in delivering their latest innovations!

The core formula of our team

I believe that innovations and new opportunities are always standing next to the risks. What makes our unit successful is a simple formula: entrepreneurial spirit combined with clear and well-organized processes. This is what I really like about our team. When I talk about the entrepreneurial spirit I mean such traits as ownership, the ability to think a few steps forward, a “helicopter view”, and taking risks, of course. Our colleagues, whether developers or managers, always have the opportunity to delve into the business problem and suggest a cutting-edge solution from their perspective. It’s a win-win situation for the company as well as for our people. I see how my team always appreciates the freedom of decision-making, and we invested a lot to grow up the entrepreneur-minded experts who are always ready to be in charge of the business.

Surely, behind such a distributed and independent team always stand strong and well-organized processes, it wouldn’t work that well without them. Our unit has a role model and horizontal system, where everyone is aware of key “W”: who, what, when, and most important — why. I believe when everyone understands its mission, we thrive as a team.

Why do people stay for so long with the unit?

Taking into account the variety of opportunities on the current tech market, long-term employment in one company (more than 5 years) is rather an exception than a trend. I’m glad that in our unit we have many specialists that stay with us for years, some of them are with Sigma Software even for 10-15 years. I consider it a good sign: people seem to be satisfied with projects, professional development, growth, and freedom we provide them with, and the most important — with the synergy our colleagues created.

Besides, .NET is one of the most comfortable languages and platforms for beginners, as it makes the development process flexible and provides one of the biggest communities in the programming field. Also, our senior specialists become mentors for newbies, so our junior colleagues get continuous support at the start of their career path while seniors could structure their knowledge and try new roles. When juniors grow up, they become future coaches for newcomers, so it’s ​​a never-ending process.

Moreover, you always can significantly change your career path without seeking anything around too far and too much. Sometimes people that prefer working with enterprises want to switch to a rapidly growing startup, or to a long-term product house, or switch from the tech track to the management track — we have all these opportunities and always welcome personal initiative. I consider this diversity of choices our distinctive feature.

The beloved traditions of the unit

Like every team, our unit has cool traditions. I’m convinced, while you only focus on work tasks, it is quite hard to see alternative ways for possible improvements. We love to participate in international hackathons which also keep up our entrepreneurial spirit, inspire us with fresh ideas and give an understanding of what can be useful for us and our clients in terms of tech solutions. For example, we had a great experience participating in the Mercedez Benz hackathon. Besides, in cooperation with other units, we even became a winner at Volvo Hackathon in Sweden. It was one of the most inspiring cross-unit team buildings for us!

A few more things are special to our team like our warm tradition — stories and photo sharing sessions. After vacations, our canteen often becomes a place for memories, where everyone can share inspiring stories from their trips such as climbing high mountains, hiking the Netherlands, Norway, visiting tropical islands, or participating in sports competitions.

Besides, we often visit our clients as well as meet them in our offices. With one of our clients, we gathered upon a cool tradition — a tea ceremony, and with others had an exciting cooking master class.

My personal perception of the unit

I consider perseverance, scrupulousness, thoroughness, strategic thinking, accuracy, and striving for perfect quality as the main traits characterizing our unit. I also must confess, I’m very proud of my big team and the people I work with. I constantly live with this feeling, that is what drives me and helps to move forward.

When we see a difficult task, I understand that there is nothing impossible with such a team, even if we don’t know how to solve the problem in the beginning. At first, you think it’s impossible, and when you succeed, succeed, and succeed again, you gain strength and common confidence. It inspires and allows me and my team to look toward new horizons.

We welcome new people to our Microsoft Solution unit! To join the team, follow the link to our Career site: https://career.sigma.software/

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