PM Decoding #1: Azure Cluster Critical Services CoE

How we work in Center of Excellence “Critical Services” at SoftServe

Have you ever heard about the Centers of Excellence (next — CoEs) at SoftServe where our most experienced engineers work? In this article, Oksana Bogomolna will tell you who our CoE team is, what they do, what mindset they follow, and how her role as Azure Cluster Project Manager is reflected in our corporation.

Oksana is a Project Manager for the Azure Cluster CoE Critical Services team. She has a background of 3+ years in HR and Recruiting, 1,5 years in HR marketing. Currently, her career is devoted to Azure Cloud Experts, where she has been the Project Manager for two years, and we are happy to share some insights about one of our top-notch teams.

Who are Critical Services?

Centers of Excellence (CoE) are generally places with a high concentration of incredible leadership skills and experts who can take on any task following cloud best practices and their own valuable experience at SoftServe. Critical Services is no exception, with such high-demand services as Cloud & DevOps, Cybersecurity, Managed Support, and Enterprise IT. We are an experienced team knowledgeable in all areas related to the cloud and have years of experience and numerous completed projects. Specifically, my guys are experts in Azure, but in our CoE, we also have teams dedicated to GCP, AWS, VMware, and technology in general.

We have experts ready to take on any challenge and support their team through every single step. Once, someone from my team compared Critical Services with military Special Forces. We come in, save everyone, set up everything, and then run to others who need help. I am so happy to have a team of superheroes who save the world one cloud at a time :)

What do we do in CoE?

Like most dedicated departments, our team has internal and external functions.

Internal functions:

• Architecture excellence. Our Architects design solutions and recognize architecture patterns at the start of all collaborations with clients.
• Sales & CSL education. We educate Sales Managers, CSL and also offer this service to other team members.
• Technology partnership. We drive company relationships with partners and develop this direction. For example, SoftServe is a partner of Microsoft.
• Capabilities development. Our team creates new approaches and solutions. We are looking for new accelerators, templates, migrations strategies, etc. It helps us to extend our services because we develop knowledge in various areas. For example, recently, our team researched and developed an implementation method for a brand new service called Azure Stack HCI. With this, our list of capabilities became longer and stronger than before.

External functions:

• Discovery & Workshops. We manage the customer request, collect requirements, investigate the current system, and offer the best solution.
• Transformation leadership. We lead the entire implementation process, offering advisory and hard-skill assistance. For example, a client wants to migrate from on-premises to the cloud. Perfect! Our engineers can lead this process.
• Implementation. Usually, our team members join technically complicated projects and help with scope implementation. Also, they could lead the team and help with the team staffing.
• Technology advisory & consulting. We’ve reached a high level of expertise, which allows us to satisfy the customer’s business needs and goals with innovative solutions and technologies.

So, we are one team, but our teammates constantly work on different projects at SoftServe, where they perform all the functions mentioned above.

What are our benefits? And what does it mean for our employees?

Our CoE provides numerous perks & opportunities to our talents:

• We work with clients, Cloud Partners technology, teams, Partnership, internal and Global Marketing -> Our Architects can be early adopters of technologies (sometimes months and years before the public can access it) and get experience outside technology.
• We encourage you to craft your role and responsibilities -> Our Architects can change the project regularly. One of our fundamental principles is short-term assignments, where our teammates can be on one project no longer than six months to encourage constant growth and capability development.
• We heavily invest in our teammates’ growth, provide professional and personal development -> Our Architects can explore numerous ways of hands-on experience with Clouds and new tech.
• We work with the best experts in the industry (GCP Fellows, AWS Ambassadors, Microsoft MVPs) -> Our Architects can rely on our management for help (VP, Director of Clouds, Cluster Lead, and PM).

What is our mindset?

The qualities we search for aren’t unique — we chase after the same ideals as every well-managed team. However, for us, communication skills aren’t optional — we look for a rare balance of hard skills and emotional intelligence.

We search for passionate people willing to do what it takes to rise to the top, learn new and complicated technologies, motivate themselves and their teammates. It’s okay if you’re not familiar with the entire technology stack of a specific project as long as you’re ready to put in the time to learn. We take ownership over our work and make sure it’s done perfectly 100% of the time and delivered on time as promised. Every person in our team is an integral part of a large system, and all parts must work. We don’t practice “babysitting” and micromanaging — you’re responsible for your work. Instead, we choose to motivate and encourage our team to try things, learn, practice, and teach others.

What is my role as PM?

As the Project Manager of the Azure Cluster at Critical Services, I have my hands full all of the time. My job teaches me to think outside of the box, manage multiple tasks at once, and stay positive no matter what.

My tasks can be divided into several large blocks:

• People management. There are a lot of people who need attention all of the time. Whether someone is getting ready for a promotion, is trying to learn new technology, or needs a shoulder to cry on — my job is to keep everyone happy.
• Finance management. Salaries, bonuses, budgets, and everything in between are all part of my day-to-day activities.
• Resource management. Projects, technology stacks, people, time frames — everything needs to be appropriately aligned to launch and run the project smoothly.
• Marketing activities. Most of our work is floating somewhere between datacenters and cloud environments. I’m responsible for bringing it into the light and making sure the public knows what we do, how we do it, and how to contact us if they need it done.
• Pre-sale activities. I like selling our services to clients. What makes my job more accessible is the confidence that my team can implement whatever I’m selling today.
• Staffing. I need to find the right person for the proper position at the right place and at the right time.
• PM on DevOps project. I like helping people solve problems. And what better place for that than a few existed projects with high stakes on different stages of production.

No matter how hard my job gets at times, I stay positive. Why? Because I’m surrounded by incredible professionals who are ready to help each other out of any situation.

This article shared a quick overview of the Azure Cluster CoE Critical Services team at SoftServe. But we would be glad to answer any questions you have in the comment section.

We are looking forward to publishing upcoming content of the Path to Great Relationships series about Project Manager collaboration with a Business Analyst.