KORUS Consulting — Service Quality and Profitability

Role: engineering leadership / turnaround | Context: high-stakes B2B service delivery

≈$100M: group revenue, 2024
1500+: employees
Top-15: IT services, CNews

Company scale — public data (CNews, 2024).

Led an operational turnaround of an underperforming engineering department. The target was to restore delivery control, improve service quality, and recover business economics while protecting strategic client commitments.

Role & authority

Position: Head of Development at KORUS Consulting, a top-10 Russian IT services firm
Reported to: the department director
Scope: Turnaround of the engineering department, quality governance, and client communications on strategic contracts.

Recommendation

"Grigoriy has excellent skills in the Linux command line, the automated deploy processes and distributed systems management."

Oleg Petrachev · ex-CTO Sprinthost · ex-Avito
worked together at KORUS

Situation

• Department was in a turnaround state with declining delivery quality.
• Client base: enterprise B2B contracts with high cost-of-failure exposure.
• Risks: delivery slippage, customer dissatisfaction, pressure on margins.
• Quality processes and engineering discipline were not formalized enough.
• VIP accounts and large pursuits periodically required engineering leadership inside the commercial motion.

Task

• Restore predictable delivery in a business-critical services environment.
• Rebuild team structure and role allocation around capability strengths.
• Introduce quality control frameworks and engineering governance.
• Reduce reputational and operational risks for key client accounts.

Action

• Led full turnaround of the engineering department with team reconfiguration.
• Reallocated roles and responsibilities based on actual capability profiles.
• Implemented quality governance and controlled delivery standards.
• Scaled automated testing practices (phpunit, cypress).
• Prioritized delivery around strategic clients and high-value contracts.
• Joined VIP presales when needed: backed the sales team with engineering and architecture depth, including major deals with large enterprise clients.
• Personally handled high-risk client communication to de-escalate delivery threats.

Skills applied

• Turnaround leadership for an engineering department: team rebuild and role realignment.
• Quality governance and formalizing controlled delivery in a B2B services context.
• Scaling automated testing (phpunit, cypress) and improving release reliability.
• Delivery focus on strategic clients and high-stakes contracts.
• VIP presales: technical and architectural support for sales; helped advance major deals with large enterprise clients.
• Managing difficult client communications: de-escalation and protecting timeline/quality commitments.

Result

Service

execution became more stable and controllable

Clients

higher satisfaction and trust

Economics

profitability improved

Client Scale

jump from typical Bitrix websites to enterprise accounts like Askona

This case shows that in B2B service organizations, quality and customer trust directly drive financial outcomes. Making quality explicit through process and governance restored service control, lowered repeat failure risk, and enabled a new scale of client commitments. In the presales motion, engineering leadership also helped move major deals forward with large enterprise clients.

Case Materials

• blog (ru): dobryakov.com/blog
• linkedin: linkedin.com/in/dobryakov
• interview series: YouTube playlist

Grigoriy Dobryakov — AI-Driven Head of Engineering

1500+ employees Top-15 IT services (CNews)

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