Pipe Metallurgical Company (TMK), with the support of UserGate, a leading Russian developer of information security solutions, conducted a unique IT track at the Horizons corporate forum, where teams worked to solve problems in the format of a business game.
To implement the idea, the IT track was combined with the "Marketing and Sales" track for the first time. According to the terms of the IT exercise, after the merger of two independent organizations, a new company emerged for which specialists needed to create a unified IT infrastructure. Each of the four teams had representatives from three IT areas who worked on the task from different angles: development (together with representatives of marketing and sales departments), IT infrastructure and IT security. The team's goal was to maximize the company's virtual income.
The company's profits were accrued by maintaining the corporate IT infrastructure in working order and ensuring the operation of virtual business users, detecting problems in the infrastructure of competing teams and submitting relevant reports to the regulator, as well as developing an MVP (the minimum viable product - the first version of a product or service with the minimum set of functions required by the end user) for tasks generated business customers. Within five days, each team developed a solution and presented it to an expert jury, which included top managers from TMK's marketing and sales unit.
As part of the IT track, there was also a presentation of reports in the "furnace pile" format - presentations that were as short and time-limited as possible. This year, the main concept is "IT for non—IT professionals", so the aim of the participants was to explain specialized IT terms to representatives of other professions. In this way, specialists learn to interact more effectively with their customers, taking into account the limited IT knowledge of business representatives, and the business expands its IT vocabulary.
"The track participants demonstrated a high level of professional competence and good teamwork skills, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of TMK's long-term systematic human resource development activities. The acquired knowledge and skills allowed the employees to successfully solve the set business task, as close as possible to the real ones being solved in the company," said Dmitry Yakob, TMK's Deputy General Director for Information Technology.
Horizons is TMK's corporate forum, which is held annually in Sochi. The event is organized by TMK2U Corporate University. In 2025, the forum will be reformatted with an emphasis on practical work — its participants
