Megafon is looking for a replacement for its infrastructure director / Andrey Gordeev / Vedomosti

Infrastructure Director and member of the board of Megafon Alexander Bashmakov has left his post, the company said in a statement. Bashmakov decided to leave the company to take on new projects, notes the operator's representative Yulia Dorokhina. According to her, the position of infrastructure director is currently vacant - the operator is looking for a person for this position.

MegaFon announced the departure of its technical director two weeks after the operator's network experienced the largest outage in its history. On May 19, the operator's subscribers in Moscow and the Volga region were left without communication for several hours. Similar problems were experienced by subscribers of Scartel (Yota brand), which belongs to MegaFon and operates on its network. The company explained the outage as a consequence of a software error in Hewlett Packard Enterprise equipment. Vedomosti's sources in telecom operators clarified that the failure occurred in the HLR (Home Location Register) system - a hardware and software complex responsible for registering subscribers in the network. The next day, MegaFon CEO Sergei Soldatenkov apologized to subscribers and said that the company had taken measures to ensure that this does not happen again.

Bashmakov's departure after the accident was predicted by two sources of Vedomosti, who are familiar with Megafon managers. Yesterday, another acquaintance of the operator's top managers linked Bashmakov's resignation to the accident. "The temptation to blame systemic problems on someone is very typical of the Russian mentality," one of these sources reflects. The departure of the manager responsible for the direction is the simplest solution, but the question is in the systemic conclusions, he adds. Yesterday, one of Megafon's managers confirmed that Bashmakov's departure is connected specifically with the failure that occurred, while another source in the operator's management, on the contrary, denied this.

The technical director's departure is not connected with the failure in the Megafon network, Dorokhina assures. Bashmakov actively participated in the elimination of the accident and coped with this task, she adds. Bashmakov also told Vedomosti that he made the decision to leave independently and that it was not connected with the accident that occurred. According to him, he informed the management about the decision to leave the company even before the failure occurred.

Bashmakov worked for the company for more than five years, joining the MegaFon team under the operator's previous CEO Ivan Tavrin. In October 2012, the manager took the position of the operator's director of strategy, later he was engaged in procurement and logistics, and in June 2015 he joined the operator's board. The manager was appointed director of infrastructure in August 2015. Bashmakov graduated from the economics department of the Ural State Technical University with a degree in marketing and before MegaFon he worked in strategic consulting - first at Accenture and then at the Boston Consulting Group.

Replenishment from Ukraine

Marketing Director of the Ukrainian operator Kyivstar Svyatoslav Gorban is moving to Megafon, where he will take the position of Director of Strategic Marketing. This was reported by Cnews and confirmed by a Megafon representative.

Despite the fact that Megafon's announcement of Bashmakov's departure is spoken of in the past tense, the top manager himself clarified that he would formally leave his position at the beginning of July, and a representative of the operator confirmed this. Considering his experience as a consultant, he worked at Megafon for almost seven years, Bashmakov recalls. "I always came to make some changes, now I consider my work done," he explains. According to him, he is considering several ambitious digital projects as an option for continuing his career, including within the USM group.

Yesterday, Soldatenkov conveyed through the press service that he thanks Bashmakov for his contribution to the company's development. Among the successful projects implemented under Bashmakov's leadership, Soldatenkov named the development of LTE networks, preparation for the launch of 5G, a single convergent billing project, and the introduction of new work methods based on agile (a flexible methodology that provides for the constant interaction of several working groups). "I have no doubt that his experience at Megafon will be useful in his future, undoubtedly successful career," Soldatenkov added.

Accidents and failures in the operators' networks, as a rule, did not lead to the departure of high-ranking managers, says Konstantin Ankilov, CEO of TMT Consulting. The question is whether Megafon perceives this failure as a systemic problem - whether the accident was the result of how work was organized in the department responsible for infrastructure, Ankilov reasons, and does not undertake to directly link Bashmakov's departure with the failure in the network.

Theoretically, a failure due to a software error can happen to any of the operators, and it is of decisive importance how quickly specialists cope with eliminating the accident and minimizing losses, says a source at one of the Big Four operators about the failure at Megafon.

Resignation after failure