Mile Grujovski has been with our company for one year now. He is one of the people responsible for our office in Skopje. As he says this was a huge change for him, but he is a type of person that never settles and wants to explore new things. Besides running our office in Skopje, he is also responsible for our Intelligent Tech Business Unit, whose main goal is to do a constant research and development to find the best solutions. Read Mile’s story below.
1. Who is Mile?
I am a guy that got its IT motivation from a simple ASCII game that I wrote in BASIC on an Iskra Delta Partner computer 30 years ago. I have upgraded that version in a Turbo Pascal Graphics and I continued with Borland Delphi. In the meantime, kernel debuggers became very interesting to me and I played a lot with SoftICE debugger and assembly language. I explored computer viruses and got into penetration testing and ethical hacking. In the meantime, I got a Bachelor’s diploma in Computer Science and a Master’s in Intelligent Information Systems. In 2004 I got certified in Microsoft .NET technology stack and that resulted in cofounding a local .NET group in 2008 that is still alive and organizing massive Code Camp events each year. Over the next 15 years, I worked with wonderful teams and delivered more than 100 solutions in the public and private sectors.
2. How did you join ⋮IW and what is your role?
⋮IW is a revolutionizing company in technology and in organizational culture. It is a great place for those who seek constant progress in their profession. Incidentally, it came on my radar considering it as a perfect match. I started working on exciting enterprise integration projects and recently got involved in research and intelligent solutions. I am currently Managing Director of our office in Skopje and Manager of Intelligent Technologies division. I track technologies in order to achieve business goals, eliminate security risks, increase user satisfaction, and maintain operations and systems. I also do some uninteresting activities such as strategic capacity planning, handling employee’s performances, overseeing finances, budgeting, and forecasting, implementing policies, etc. My start here was enjoyable considering the already established organizational procedures and policies.
3. When going back to the first month of working at ⋮IW, what was the biggest challenge that you experienced?
Uncertainty, there was a lot of uncertainty. Clients, teams, and business to name a few. I was fortunate to lay out a vision of future events precise enough to be captured in a detailed analysis. The idea was to find the most probable result and create a strategy based on it.
4. Tell us about your biggest accomplishments in your life so far?
Being a proud father of three and staying sane at the same time. Life is much more complicated when you do not have enough hands to hold each of the children’s hands when crossing the street. Professionally, I had a fantastic year behind. We expanded our market, built incredible solutions, and established great relationships with the clients. But the thing that I feel as the greatest accomplishment is the fact that we established our core team and so far, have managed to have great talent while keeping our core values steady. Incredible talent is critical to success. While we still have a lot of work to do, I am extremely proud of the team we have managed to build over the past year, and feel confident that it sets us up for further success.
5. What about Mile outside of work? What do you enjoy doing and how does that contribute to your day to day job?
Outside of my professional activities, I enjoy playing music, cycling, and cooking. I find these activities relaxing and enjoyable. All of the activities require consistency, patience, passion, and a lot of creativity. Those are the skills that are applicable in the business and everyday operations as well. A proper mindset can make or break everything.
6. We are caught up in a really unexpected situation – COVID-19. How are you handling your work-life balance now? Have you learned any new skills in the past couple of months while working from home?
The current COVID pandemic is something unpredictable that happens once in 100 years. It puts to test our minds’ dynamic abilities. It is believed that cognitive flexibility is among the most wanted human abilities in the 21st century. Rapid innovation and change are critical in this situation. However, for me working from home contributed to better balancing work-life. In the past period, I had more time with my family and my personal projects. I read a lot of books, enrolled in a music composition course, and had great cycling adventures.
6. Main motivators to do what you do
The strongest motivator for me is the challenge. I am in a constant race with myself internally. This process is driven by learning new skills and multidisciplinary self-improvement. Everyone should challenge themselves and envision a different – better future than the current one. The comfort state is a dangerous one. It prevents improvement, it stops accomplishing all the things that we are gifted of achieving and it makes us unhappy. Commit to change something in your life that you are unhappy with and start feeling positive changes instantly.
