OPENING PROFILE

Foundations First

Understanding the professional philosophy of Mariia Korovina

Mariia Korovina uses a house to explain her work.

"The stronger and deeper the foundation," she says, "the more stable the building will be." She means the discovery phase of an ERP transformation: the early, unglamorous period in which a consultant sits with a business and tries to understand how it works, where it hurts, what depends on what, and what the company expects at the end. In her view this phase determines the outcome more than any later decision about configuration, integration, or go-live strategy.

It is a revealing image. Foundations are invisible once a building is finished. Nobody admires them. But every structural failure traces back to them eventually. Her professional identity is built around that kind of invisible, load-bearing work: understanding, listening, and asking questions before building anything.

She currently serves as ERP Transformation Lead at Intellias, where her responsibilities span ERP architecture, transformation strategy, project planning, stakeholder alignment, business process design, and the financial logic that ties it all together. Her deepest technical experience is with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and her career, spanning more than a decade, includes more than ten ERP and digital transformation projects.

But she is quick to say that the technology is not the point.

"The system itself is only a tool," she told us. "The real purpose of transformation is to solve business problems and help the company grow."

Three Convictions

Three convictions run through everything Mariia Korovina said in her interview, and they organize this profile.

The first is that people come first. "No digital transformation should succeed at the cost of losing the people who make the business work. Technology should support people, not simply replace or ignore them."

The second is that understanding precedes building. Discovery is not a preliminary formality. It is the foundation. And before any process is automated, it should be questioned: does it still make sense, and can it be simplified?

The third is that an ERP system is a financial instrument as much as an operational one. A successful implementation produces reliable financial data and, through it, better business decisions. Systems that merely digitize existing confusion have failed, however well they run.

These convictions did not arrive as theory. They were assembled over ten years, role by role, from the experience of doing the work, and from what she describes as many hours spent analyzing what worked, what did not, and what she could have done differently.

THE JOURNEY

From Cold Calls to Transformation Leadership

A career built in layers, through disruption

Mariia Korovina did not set out to become an ERP specialist. Her first degree was in food engineering, which she studied at the National University of Food Technologies, graduating with honors in 2014. It was a rigorous technical education, and she left university expecting to work in her field.

The timing made that impossible.

"At that time it was extremely difficult to find a suitable position in my field," she recalls. "At the same time, the war started in Ukraine, my family situation changed, and I needed to become financially independent quite quickly."

She took what was available. She joined SITIS Group of Companies as a Junior Marketer, and the work was exactly as modest as the title suggests: cold calls, conversations with potential customers, and help selling a boxed accounting software product that was popular in Ukraine at the time.

It was not the career she had planned. But she is clear about what it became.

"This company became a very important starting point and trampoline for my career."

Into the Machinery of Business

After about a year, she moved into a Junior Business Analyst role, and her working life changed character. She stopped selling software and began to understand what the software was for.

At first the processes she worked with were relatively simple. But this was where she began to see how accounting works, how business processes are constructed, and, most importantly, what stands behind them from a business perspective. The questions she was learning to ask, why a process exists, who depends on it, what happens downstream when it changes, are the questions she still asks today.

A few years later she became a Senior Business Analyst, and the range of her exposure widened considerably. She worked with clients in construction, distribution, retail, manufacturing, and other industries. She worked across the functional domains that make up a company's financial and operational core: payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable, taxation, treasury, budgeting, and accounting.

She describes this period as "the first strong layer of my professional knowledge," and says that much of what she does today still rests on it.

There is a lesson in that for anyone building a career in technology consulting. The breadth she acquired at SITIS, seeing how differently companies in different industries organize what are fundamentally the same processes, is not something that can be learned quickly or from a book. It accumulates through exposure, and it is the raw material from which judgment is made.

The Financial Turn

Her next step was INTECH, where she worked as a Process Automation Manager during the COVID period. Alongside that role she had the opportunity to work partly in financial controlling, and this proved to be a turning point in how she understood her own field.

"This helped me transform my accounting and bookkeeping knowledge into a much broader understanding of financial and managerial accounting," she says. Concepts like EBITDA, net profit, financial performance, and management reporting became part of her daily professional language.

The effect on her view of ERP was profound. She came to see that a system implemented without regard to financial outcomes had not really been implemented well, however smoothly the technical delivery went. "Proper financial figures," she says, "are one of the key results of a well-designed ERP environment."

A Second Disruption

Then the circumstances of her life changed again. The full-scale war in Ukraine altered her professional path a second time, and she moved to the United Kingdom, where she joined Algeco UK as a Senior Business Analyst.

The move gave her something valuable and unexpected: exposure to a completely different ERP environment, international business processes, and the demands of SOX audit compliance. She learned to see digital transformation "not only from a system perspective, but also from the perspective of governance, compliance, and international standards."

For the past three years she has worked in business automation architecture at Advanced Hosting and in ERP transformation at Intellias, where her focus is the full breadth of the discipline: ERP architecture, transformation strategy, project planning, stakeholder alignment, business processes, financial results, and people.

It is worth pausing on the arc. From cold calls to a transformation leadership role. From a food engineering degree to the architecture of enterprise systems. Through two periods of upheaval that would have derailed many careers. Each stage, as she describes it, deposited a layer, and the layers compounded.

"Every role added a new layer to my understanding," she told us: "business processes, accounting, finance, international compliance, architecture, project management, and finally transformation leadership."

LAYER BY LAYER

How Each Role Built an ERP Architect

The specific contribution of each stage of a decade-long career

Mariia Korovina's account of her career is unusually specific about what each position taught her. Taken together, the lessons read almost like a curriculum for the discipline.

SITIS Group: the foundation. Starting from basic customer communication and moving into analysis, she learned how business processes connect with accounting and how functions inside a company depend on each other. Clients in construction, retail, and distribution showed her "how differently companies can organize the same processes."

Senior analyst years: the connected system. Working across payroll, payables, receivables, tax, treasury, and budgeting taught her to look at ERP "not as a set of separate modules, but as one connected business system." That perspective, she says, was among the most important she acquired.

INTECH: the financial lens. Here she began connecting process design to management reporting, profitability, and EBITDA. She understood that "an ERP system should not only automate operations, but also provide reliable data for management decisions."

Algeco UK: governance and compliance. Working in another ERP environment and participating in SOX audit processes taught her the importance of controls, documentation, and transparency.

Intellias: synthesis. At Intellias, she says, "all these previous layers came together." The role is end-to-end: discovery, design, implementation, testing, data migration, change management, and stabilization.

The Question Before Automation

Out of this accumulated experience comes a principle that she returns to repeatedly, and that distinguishes her approach from the more mechanical conception of ERP as a tool for digitizing whatever a business already does.

"The goal is not to automate an inefficient process exactly as it is," she says. "The first question should always be: Does this process still make sense, and can we simplify it before we automate it?"

The principle is easy to state and difficult to practice. Clients arrive with existing processes, which carry organizational history, personal investment, and the inertia of habit. Asking whether a process should exist at all can feel like a challenge to the people who built it. A consultant who raises the question needs both the technical credibility to be taken seriously and the interpersonal skill to ask it constructively.

This is where her coaching orientation, discussed later in this edition, becomes practically important. The best process improvements often come not from the consultant's analysis but from a client who has been helped to see their own work with fresh eyes.

She describes the result of all this as a way of managing ERP rollouts "not only as IT projects, but as full business transformations."

DEFINING SUCCESS

People, Value, and the Limits of PMBOK

Why Mariia Korovina measures ERP success differently

Open any standard project management text and you will find a definition of project success: delivery within scope, within budget, within timeline. Mariia Korovina does not reject this. She says plainly that these factors matter. But for ERP implementation specifically, she adds two criteria that change the picture considerably.

The First Criterion: Did You Keep Your People?

"For me, a successful ERP implementation means that we did not lose our accountants, developers, key users, or other important people during the transformation."

The observation is practical rather than sentimental. ERP projects are demanding. They place heavy loads on finance teams, operations staff, and technical resources, often while those same people continue to run the business. Companies, she notes, sometimes focus so intensely on the system that they forget about the people who need to work with it every day.

"If the system goes live but the team is exhausted, disengaged, or key employees leave, I would not consider this a fully successful transformation."

It is a demanding standard, and it reframes several familiar project decisions. A compressed timeline that burns out the key users is not a success delivered early. It is a cost deferred. A go-live that depends on heroic effort from a handful of individuals is not a triumph of execution. It is a risk that has not yet materialized.

The Second Criterion: Can the Business Feel the Difference?

The second criterion is real business improvement. An ERP implementation, in her view, should never happen merely because a new system is modern, has a better interface, or because transformation as a concept sounds attractive. There must be a clear business reason behind it.

"The project is successful when, after implementation, the business can clearly feel the difference: some pain has been removed, processes became easier or more transparent, manual work was reduced, decision-making became faster, or the company received a stronger foundation for future growth."

The test is experiential. It does not ask whether the project met its specification. It asks whether the people in the business can tell that something has improved. A system that satisfies every requirement in the project plan but changes nothing perceptible for the people who rely on it has delivered technical completion without business value.

She summarizes her definition as "a combination of traditional project delivery, people retention, and measurable business value."

A Project That Shaped Her Thinking

Asked about her most impactful projects, Mariia Korovina points to a large three-year ERP transformation for a construction company. It was an end-to-end program covering the full business cycle: procurement and purchase orders, construction operations, and the final sale of square meters to customers.

The scale and duration of the project gave her a vivid, practical understanding of how processes interlock inside a single ERP environment, and of why it is necessary to think about the whole chain from the first transaction to the final financial result rather than about isolated functions.

Characteristically, she declines to present it as a singular turning point.

"I would not say that there is only one or two projects that shaped me the most. Who I am professionally today is the result of many different projects, both successful and unsuccessful."

She places particular weight on the unsuccessful ones, and on what she did with them. "Professional growth comes not only from successful delivery, but from reflection after difficult situations. I spent many hours analyzing what worked, what did not work, what I could have done differently, and how I could improve my approach next time."

It is a rare thing for a senior professional to say so plainly: the most impactful projects are not necessarily the biggest ones. They are the ones that changed how she thinks.

COMPLIANCE AND COMMON SENSE

The SOX Lesson

What Algeco UK taught Mariia Korovina about the tension between control and efficiency

Compliance is one of the least discussed difficulties in ERP work, partly because the people who understand it best are often too constrained by it to speak freely about its costs. Mariia Korovina speaks about it with unusual candor.

At Algeco UK, her responsibilities included SOX audit processes, the implementation of a role matrix in accordance with SOX requirements, and project management for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The combination placed her at the exact point where regulatory demands meet operational reality.

Both Sides of the Argument

She begins by acknowledging the friction. "Compliance can sometimes become a restriction for business efficiency. A company may need to post new data, implement a system change, or release an improvement quickly, but at the same time it must follow all required controls, approvals, documentation, and evidence procedures. This naturally adds time and complexity."

But she is equally clear about why the controls exist. SOX compliance, she explains, is not merely a matter of having a role matrix. It means being able to demonstrate that financial data cannot be changed without control, that ERP releases are properly documented, and that the company can always determine who changed data, who had the access to change it, and what exactly was altered.

Neither side of the tension is dismissed. That balance is the substance of her lesson.

When Audit Requirements Meet System Performance

Her most concrete example concerns change logging in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. An audit requirement to log every field and every change in every document may look simple on paper. In practice, the volume of logs can become enormous and degrade system performance.

"The company needs to find a reasonable balance between having enough evidence for compliance and keeping the ERP system stable and usable for everyday operations."

From this she draws a recommendation that audit and ERP teams need to work much more closely together, and that SOX audits should include IT specialists who understand technically how ERP systems behave. Requirements written without that understanding can impose costs that the auditors never intended and the business cannot afford.

Her broader conclusion is architectural: "Compliance should not be treated as a separate layer added at the end. It should be designed together with the ERP architecture and business processes from the beginning. The goal is not only to be compliant, but to be compliant in a way that still allows the business to work efficiently."

WHERE FINANCE MEETS PROCESS

The INTECH Years

How project management and financial analysis became a single discipline

At INTECH Industrial Technologies, Mariia Korovina managed end-to-end project planning, resource coordination, risk management, requirements alignment, testing, and delivery control. She also calculated financial indicators for projects: free cash flow, working capital, profitability, and project financial results.

The combination was formative, because the two activities are usually separated. Project managers deliver to scope and schedule. Financial analysts evaluate results afterward. At INTECH, she did both, and she began to see the connections that the separation conceals.

"Procurement terms can influence working capital. Delays in invoicing can affect cash flow. Incorrect cost allocation can distort profitability. Weak project planning can finally appear in financial results."

An ERP system, she realized, is the environment in which all of these links can be made visible. It gives a company the ability to connect operational decisions and financial consequences in one place, if it is designed to do so.

Three Dimensions

Since that period, she has evaluated automation through three lenses: process, technology, and finance.

A system can work flawlessly from an IT standpoint and still deliver limited value if it does not improve financial transparency, reduce unnecessary manual work, support better decisions, or positively influence business performance. Technical excellence is necessary and insufficient.

"A strong ERP solution should support business operations, provide reliable financial data, and help management understand what is really happening inside the company."

This is why, when she scopes an ERP engagement today, technical decisions are always tied to measurable business and financial outcomes. It is a discipline that protects clients from a common failure: a technically successful project whose benefits nobody can quantify.

LEADING WITHOUT CONTROLLING

The PMO Years and the Power of Trust

What running a Project Management Office taught Mariia Korovina about leadership

As Head of PMO at SITIS Group of Companies, Mariia Korovina was responsible for project roadmap planning, resource allocation, risk management, and customer training. It was an exercise in managing many things at once without losing sight of the details of any of them.

The experience taught her prioritization, resource management across competing initiatives, and flexibility when priorities change. But the lessons she emphasizes most are about people.

Trust as Infrastructure

"One of the strongest leadership lessons for me was how to build a sustainable team based on trust. I learned that strong leadership does not mean controlling every detail or going deep into micromanagement. It means creating a team where you can rely on people, where responsibilities are clear, and where professionals feel ownership of their work."

She was fortunate, she says, to build a strong core team, people she thought of as her "left hand and right hand." She regards this kind of relationship with strong professionals as one of the most important things a leader can build.

The point is more significant than it might sound. Micromanagement is usually understood as a personality flaw. Mariia Korovina treats its opposite, delegation grounded in trust, as an organizational asset that must be deliberately constructed over time, through clarity of responsibility and consistent follow-through.

Agility Over Literalism

A second lesson concerns the relationship between contracts, plans, and customer needs.

"Sometimes strict following of a contract or original plan is not enough. A PMO also needs to understand the real customer need, react to changes, and find the best way to achieve the expected result."

Her formulation is direct: "Project management is not only about compliance with the plan. It is about delivering value in a practical and responsible way."

It is a position that some in the profession would find uncomfortable, because plans and contracts provide protection. But it reflects a mature view of what projects are for. A plan is an instrument for reaching a result. When the plan and the result diverge, the result is what matters.

A Sentence on a Wall

She remembers a line displayed on the wall at Algeco: "People are our most valuable asset." She mentions it not as a slogan she admired from a distance but as a statement that reflects her own approach. "I understand that my own results are strongly connected with the people around me and with the strength of my team."

THE SIMULATION

Learning Project Management by Living It

The origins of "Project Management: Basic" and the case for experiential learning

Among her recent achievements, Mariia Korovina is most animated about a business simulation called "Project Management: Basic," developed in partnership with Ascendis Ukraine. It combines classical project management principles with a coaching approach, and it is the clearest expression of her belief that project management is a human practice before it is a technical one.

Where It Came From

The simulation grew from three sources: her professional journey in project management, the lessons she drew from real projects, and her own coaching experience.

A further influence came from her MBA studies at the Kyiv School of Economics, where a course led by Dr. Olena Khomenko used a coaching approach in the learning process. The experience demonstrated to her how powerful coaching can be "when we need to understand what people really think, what they really need, and what they are trying to achieve."

The insight that followed was practical. "In project management, many important things are not said directly. Stakeholders may hide their real concerns, motives, expectations, or fears. Sometimes they do not even clearly understand them themselves."

This is a problem that frameworks do not solve. A stakeholder register can list a person's influence and interest, but it cannot tell a project manager what that person is afraid of. Only a conversation can do that, and only a conversation of a particular quality.

The coaching approach, as she describes it, is about "learning how to ask better questions, how to listen actively, and how to create a safe environment where stakeholders can speak openly." Sometimes, she says, the most useful thing a project manager can do is simply stop talking and listen to the client.

Why Simulation Is Different

Traditional project management training teaches frameworks, tools, and theory. Participants emerge knowing the terminology and the standard processes. What they have not done is make a decision under uncertainty, negotiate with a difficult stakeholder, or live with the consequences of a poor choice.

A simulation compels all of that. "They have to make decisions, communicate with stakeholders, deal with uncertainty, and experience the consequences of their choices."

Adding coaching deepens the learning further. Participants practice not only what to do in a project but "how to understand people better, how to identify hidden needs, and how to build stronger communication with stakeholders."

"People do not just hear what good project management looks like," she says. "They actually live through it, reflect on their decisions, and learn from the experience."

The Porsche Group Workshop

A customized version of the simulation, "Project Management: The Basics," was developed for Porsche Group through Ascendis Ukraine. It reflects the same philosophy, with content designed around business value rather than academic theory.

Several themes are central to the design.

Leadership without subordinates. "A project manager often works with people who do not report directly to them and who may even be higher in the organizational hierarchy." Project management, therefore, is largely about influence, facilitation, trust, communication, and the ability to connect different people around a shared goal.

Active listening and powerful questions. Participants learn to understand what is behind a stakeholder's request: the actual problem, and the result the person expects.

Productivity. She wants people to learn to avoid unnecessary meetings, and above all the familiar phrase: "We need one more meeting." Good project management, in her view, helps teams make decisions, move forward, and use their time well.

Leadership by example. "You cannot force people to be engaged, but you can create an environment where they understand the purpose, feel responsibility, and want to contribute."

Reflection. The simulation ends with three questions: What did we do well? Where did we make mistakes? What should we do differently next time?

The Habit of Reflection

The last of these is the one she treats as nearly sacred. "I strongly believe that experience alone is not enough. We have to stop and think about what happened."

She applies the same discipline in real project work: not only at the end of a project, but after sprints, at key milestones, and sometimes monthly. The practice helps a team see what is working, what is not, and whether it needs to change a tool, a process, or occasionally its mindset.

"Training should not only give people knowledge. It should help them think differently, make better decisions, work better with people, and find a stronger path to the project goal."

THE RESEARCH

What 100 Respondents Said About ERP Partners and AI

Insights from Mariia Korovina's MBA study of the ERP implementation and consulting market

As part of her MBA at the Kyiv School of Economics, Mariia Korovina is researching the ERP implementation and consulting services market. She has reached more than one hundred respondents, and the findings, though still emerging, confirm and sharpen several of her professional convictions.

Three Trends

The rapid growth of AI in enterprise systems. AI-enabled tools now feature in almost every conversation about ERP, bringing opportunity and, in her phrase, "a lot of noise and confusion." Her own position is expressed in a line she uses often: "AI can be your hands, but it should not become your brain."

She explains: "For me, AI is a very powerful tool, but business still needs strong expertise, critical thinking, and people who understand how processes really work."

The rising importance of trust in implementation partners. One of the strongest messages from respondents was that companies want confidence in the vendor they choose. They want to know the vendor will stay involved, understand their business, and deliver a result that is genuinely useful, "not just technically completed."

A stronger expectation of practical business value. Companies increasingly expect ERP projects to deliver clear and practical benefit, not simply to conclude on schedule.

The Question of Price

Cost, naturally, features in the research. Companies want more value for less money. But Mariia Korovina draws a careful distinction.

"ERP transformation is still a very knowledge-intensive area. A large part of the value comes from people's experience, expertise, judgment, and best practices. This is why high-quality transformation cannot be treated as a cheap technical service."

This is an argument that consultancies often struggle to make convincingly to clients. She makes it from the standpoint of someone who has watched both sides of the engagement, and who has data from more than a hundred voices to support it.

The research also reinforces her view of where every project should begin: "ERP transformation should start with understanding the client: how the business works, where the real pain points are, what should be improved, and what result the company expects at the end."

THE LISTENING PROBLEM

Hidden Pain Points and the Coaching Approach

The thesis of her address at Kyiv Project Management Day 2026

On October 10, 2026, Mariia Korovina will speak at Kyiv Project Management Day on the theme "Beyond stakeholder management: hidden pain points and how to solve them." Her central argument is disarmingly simple.

"One of the biggest problems is that people often hear, but do not really listen."

Organizations invest heavily in stakeholder management: registers, matrices, communication plans, status reports. Often these are executed well, and still the project struggles. Her explanation is that the frameworks, however useful, can lead practitioners to forget the person behind each stakeholder role.

"Behind every stakeholder role there is a real person with a different background, different experiences, different beliefs, fears, motivations, and personal limitations."

She acknowledges that this may sound a little romantic. "But for me it is very practical."

The Estimation Example

She offers a concrete illustration. A team constantly underestimates its tasks. The conventional response is to improve estimation techniques: better templates, more training, tighter review.

But the cause may lie elsewhere. "Maybe people are overloaded, afraid to speak openly, missing information, or working under unrealistic expectations. Until we understand the real reason, another process or another template will not solve the problem."

Here is where a good question does the work that a process cannot. "Sometimes one good question can reveal much more than several meetings."

Two Pillars

Effective stakeholder communication, she argues, rests on two pillars.

The first is discipline: a clear, regular, predictable communication plan. "If a project manager promises a status update every week on the same day, it should happen. This builds trust."

The second is the quality of the conversation itself: active listening, powerful questions, and genuine interest in what is behind the stakeholder's words.

A perfectly organized communication plan, then, can still fail if people only exchange information without understanding one another. Her principle is compact enough to remember: "Listen to your people, ask the right questions, and do not assume that the first answer is always the real one."

WHAT WINNERS SHARE

Common Traits of Organizations That Transform Well

What a career across industries and countries reveals about successful ERP transformation

Mariia Korovina has worked across industrial technology, workforce housing, hosting and infrastructure, and IT consulting, in Ukraine and in the United Kingdom, with clients spanning construction, retail, distribution, and manufacturing. We asked what the organizations that transform successfully have in common.

Her answer was not about technology, budget, or size.

"The strongest common factor is the mindset of the leaders who drive the company."

Successful organizations, she observes, tend to be led by people who want the business to be transparent and clear. They want to know what is really happening inside the company and to make fast decisions on accurate, reliable data. They want to grow and scale without constantly adding manual work, headcount, or complexity. And they are prepared to look critically at their existing processes.

"For them, ERP transformation is not only an IT initiative. It is a way to build a stronger operating model that can support future growth."

She adds a point that many organizations find difficult: sometimes the company needs not just a new system but a different way of working.

Her summary: "Regardless of industry, successful ERP transformation starts with leadership mindset: the willingness to build transparency, trust data, simplify processes, and create a business that can scale in a sustainable way."

ADVICE

On Acting Before You Feel Ready

Mariia Korovina to aspiring leaders, and to women in technology in particular

Asked what she would say to aspiring leaders, and especially to women building careers in project management and technology, Mariia Korovina's first answer was three words long.

"Do not be afraid to act."

She elaborates: take your ideas, bring them to life, experiment, see what comes back, reflect, and decide what works. "This is how you build your own best practices, not only from books, but from real experience."

She grounds the advice in the Cynefin framework, which distinguishes simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic situations. Many of the situations leaders face today are complex or chaotic, she notes, which means that waiting until all the answers are available is not always possible. "Sometimes we need to act, observe the result, respond, and adjust our next decision."

Her second piece of advice is to ask for help. "There are many experienced professionals who are ready to share how they solved similar problems, what mistakes they made, and what they learned from them."

To women in particular, she says: "Do not wait until you feel 100% ready." Build technical expertise, but develop business thinking, communication, leadership, and decision-making alongside it.

Her last line is the most personal:

"Grow your own wings and fly towards your goal."

Balancing Learning and Delivery

The advice carries weight because of how she lives it. She is completing an MBA while working full time, taking external development courses, and speaking at professional events. She does not pretend this is easy: "It can sometimes be exhausting. It requires a lot of energy, discipline, and personal motivation."

What sustains her is a clear professional dream: to become one of the strongest professionals in her field and to inspire others by example. She also wants to make project management feel "more understandable and less intimidating," showing that with the right tools, mindset, and structure, people can understand and apply it.

She has stopped treating learning and work as separate activities. "Everything I learn through my MBA, external courses, professional events, and discussions with other experts gives me new ideas that I can bring back to my team and to Intellias. Sometimes it can be a new tool, sometimes a different way of looking at a problem, and sometimes just a better question to ask."

The balance, she says, "is not about keeping work and development completely separate. It is about making them strengthen each other."

THE LONG VIEW

ERP as a Strategic Business Platform

The legacy Mariia Korovina hopes to leave

Her long-term vision begins with a single idea: "ERP should support business growth, not slow it down."

She is sober about how quickly ERP systems can become legacy, and equally sober about why they cannot simply be swapped out. "It is deeply connected with finance, operations, people, controls, and daily business processes. That is why the choice of an ERP system has to be very careful and strategic."

Questions to Ask from the Start

She encourages companies to put several questions on the table at the beginning of any selection process:

Is the system scalable? Is there a strong professional community around it? Can it be supported globally? Is it secure from a cybersecurity perspective? Does it provide proper backup and recovery, data protection, segregation of duties, and access control?

The security questions reflect a part of her professional development that complements her business training: her Google Cybersecurity certification, alongside her Google Project Management certification, which she pairs with strategic business education through her MBA. The combination of technical literacy and business perspective runs through how she frames these decisions.

No Workaround on a Workaround

Another principle she holds firmly: "Do not build one workaround on top of another workaround."

Temporary fixes solve today's problem, but over time they accumulate into complexity, technical debt, and limits on future growth. ERP implementation, she argues, should rest on a strong architecture and a clear long-term vision.

Value and Lean Thinking

Through her MBA she sees many companies planning to scale, enter new markets, or launch new business lines. These decisions, she observes, depend on data: financials, FP&A indicators, budgets, forecasts, and actual results.

But she wants to push further. "We should ask whether our business creates real and unique value for customers, and whether our ERP environment supports this value. ERP should not only record transactions. It should help the company understand what creates value and where unnecessary complexity exists."

This is where she draws on Lean thinking: continuously reviewing ERP processes and removing steps that create no value for the business or its customers.

Her closing statement on legacy is precise: "I would like organizations to see ERP as a strategic business platform that connects people, processes, finance, technology, security, and long-term business value."

CLOSING ESSAY

Growing Your Own Wings

On foundations, listening, and the human side of digital transformation

It would be easy to read Mariia Korovina's career as a story of adaptation. A graduate in food engineering who could not find work in her field. A junior marketer making cold calls. An analyst, a manager, an architect, a leader. A professional who rebuilt her working life in a new country when circumstances demanded it.

Adaptation is part of it. But adaptation alone does not explain the coherence of what she has built.

What is striking, reading her answers as a whole, is how consistent they are. The same convictions surface whether she is discussing a three-year construction ERP program, a SOX audit, a coaching-based simulation, or a conference talk about stakeholders. People matter first. Understanding comes before building. Systems exist to serve business value and financial truth. Reflection turns experience into judgment. And listening, real listening, is rarer and more powerful than most professionals admit.

These are not fashionable positions. In an industry that is currently preoccupied with artificial intelligence, platforms, and speed, a leader who insists on discovery, on retaining the people who make the business work, and on asking whether a process should exist before automating it can sound almost old-fashioned.

She is not old-fashioned. She is describing what the technology cannot do for itself. "AI can be your hands, but it should not become your brain." The hands will keep getting stronger. The question of what they should build, for whom, and at what human cost remains a question for people with expertise, judgment, and the willingness to listen.

There is something fitting in the fact that a professional who learned her craft through disruption now teaches others how to navigate it. Her simulation puts participants in the position of making decisions under uncertainty and then asks them to reflect. Her conference talk invites project managers to hear the person behind the stakeholder role. Her research asks what clients actually need from the firms they trust with their businesses.

And her advice to the next generation, particularly the women entering technology and project leadership, is the advice her own career embodies: act before you feel fully ready, ask for help, keep learning, and test your ideas in the world.

The house metaphor she began with is worth returning to at the end. A foundation is invisible once the building stands. Nobody tours a house and admires the footings. But everything depends on them, and the quality of the whole is decided long before the walls go up.

Mariia Korovina builds foundations, in systems, in teams, and in the people she teaches. If the work is done well, nobody will see it. Everyone will feel it.

The CXO Insight thanks Mariia Korovina for the thoughtfulness and candor of her responses. We look forward to following her address at Kyiv Project Management Day on October 10, 2026, and the continuing development of her work in ERP transformation and project leadership.