“Without a doubt, the programme helped me bridge the gap betweentactical and strategic project management.”
Nikolay Valchev
Project Manager, PokerStars
As a Project Manager, Nikolay Valchev is always looking to build short-term tactics into long-term strategy. As his inspiration, Sun Tzu, says, “Every battle is won way before it is fought”.
When Nikolay found a London Business School programme that could help him apply this philosophy to digital transformation, he sensed it could be a huge step for his career.
My career journey
After seven years in the banking industry, I moved to IQVIA, a company that offers clinical research services, advanced analytics, and technology solutions. In this international health technology business, I was responsible for managing the scope of work and budget, mostly for projects that were classified as black-class and valued at more than $10 million USD.
After being promoted and obtaining the main internationally-recognised project management certifications, I moved to another company, Mobile Wave Solutions, delivering large-scale IT projects for the UK market. It was a great experience but I soon reached a turning point in my career where I realised I needed a bigger challenge. That’s when I found PokerStars in 2022 and became part of the Flutter family. Currently, I am managing large-scale transformation projects for PokerStars and Flutter Entertainment, a global gaming and entertainment provider with leading international brands including PokerStars, Paddy Power, FanDuel, Sky Betting & Gaming, Sportsbet, Sisal, Tombola, TVG, Junglee Games and Adjarabet. With over 20,000 talented employees, Flutter operates under license in 22 territories and has a presence in over 100 countries around the world. This opportunity gave me the scale I need to develop.
Our ultimate objective is to satisfy our customers' needs by offering creative, highly scalable solutions in a highly competitive worldwide market. When I joined PokerStars, I knew that to help make this happen I’d have to bridge the gap between my tactical project management knowledge, and being able to understand the wider strategy principles that drive organisations like ours forward.
The principles I hold dear in life resonate profoundly with the essence of Project Management. Inspired by the wisdom of Sun Tzu, the esteemed Chinese general and strategist, I adopt the philosophy that victory is secured long before the battle commences. This philosophy is the cornerstone of my approach to both my personal and professional life.
“Every digital leader has experience, but what I really believe in is having the knowledge to go with it.”
My learning experience
If you are not busy being born, you are busy dying - Bob Dylan”.I heard this quote from John Fallon several times during the programme as it resonates deeply with the necessity for organisations to start a digital transformation. This idea encapsulates the urgency and inevitability of change, particularly in the context of how businesses must adapt to technological advances.
In the digital era, organisations face a rapidly evolving landscape where new technologies disrupt traditional business models and consumer behaviors shift dynamically. If a company is not actively engaging in "being born" — that is, continually reinventing itself, integrating new digital technologies, and adapting to changing market demands — it risks "dying." This means falling behind its competitors, becoming irrelevant to consumer needs, and ultimately failing to sustain its operations.
Digital transformation represents the process of “being born”. It involves the adoption of digital technology to transform services or businesses, through replacing non-digital or manual processes with digital processes or replacing older technologies with newer digital ones. This transformation can lead to significant changes in how a business operates and delivers value to its customers. It encompasses everything from new ways of working, improved organisational structure, automating processes, and data analytics to developing new business strategies and models for digital customer engagement.
Organisations that resist or delay digital transformation often find themselves struggling to catch up. Without embracing digital capabilities, they may lose their competitive edge, suffer reduced efficiency, and miss out on opportunities for growth. On the other hand, those who invest in digital transformation are positioning themselves to be more adaptable, agile, and responsive to consumer demands and market changes. This proactive approach not only preserves their relevance but also drives innovation and growth, embodying the essence of "being born" in the context of ongoing organisational evolution.
Every digital leader has experience, but what I really believe in is having the knowledge to go with it. I remember thinking that if I could acquire it from a place like London Business School, it would be verified information from the best experts in the world.
I joined the School’s Leading Digital Transformation programme, and quickly started to find the knowledge I was looking for. I learned from John Fallon, the man who turned Pearson into the world’s leading digital learning company. He talked about digital transformation as being a process that never ends – one that needs a culture of disruption in your organisation so it can keep adapting to changes in the market.
Faculty with priceless experience, like Julian Birkinshaw, explained the difference between digitising and transforming. One is just adopting solutions, and the other is actually tailoring those solutions to your business needs – simplifying and standardising everything you can to create smooth, efficient processes, and understanding the tactics used by big platform companies to threaten incumbents. At a huge company like PokerStars dealing with hundreds of stakeholders, learning how to do all this was invaluable.
What I learned from John Fallon and Julian Birkinshaw is that to effectively navigate through disruption, it's crucial to approach it with a structured mindset, recognizing that an organisation functions as a cohesive ecosystem. Each core capabilities are interdependent, and maintaining a strategic equilibrium among them is essential. I believe this is where the largest organisations and their platforms suffer these days.
We can’t generalise, but for 9 of the 10 biggest companies and their platforms, they need to focus on new ways to enhance the customer journey and become more efficient. This involves developing a top-tier, customisable agent console that consolidates their supporting tools into a unified system, This helps to streamline customer interactions, improve support quality, and ensure that every touchpoint with clients is intuitive, responsive, and satisfying.
On the supply side, the focus should be on centralised data solutions to provide a holistic view of customer behaviour and preferences. Imagine a company where every piece of data harmonises within a unified platform, merging disparate data sources and applications into a sleek, efficient infrastructure. This not only paves the way for integration with AI technologies in the future but also gives organisations real-time insights they can use to respond to emerging risks more quickly.
As faculty and industry experts spoke through their experience, I realised digital transformation is integrative, bridging gaps across product development, architecture, technology, analytics, marketing, operations, and customer service. Without cross-departmental cooperation, aligning collective efforts, capitalising on synergies, and executing unified digital strategies becomes an uphill battle. While the organisations steer through this digital odyssey, their focus must not only be on technological innovation but also on fostering an environment where collaboration thrives.
“The programme’s ‘seeing the bigger picture’ philosophy really chimed with my instincts.”
The impact
Studying actual cases and learning from John’s experience with Pearson and other industry-proven experts, like Jeremy Darroch and Gavin Patterson, made it clear to me that attempting a digital transformation without investing in people and developing a well-defined strategy won’t be successful. This was game-changing for me as I was mainly focused on the technological aspects before the programme at London Business School.
During the programme, I quickly realized that the success of a digital transformation depends fundamentally on investing in people and overcoming resistance to change, as these factors directly affect an organisation's ability to adapt and successfully integrate new technology into its operations.
This investment is more than just implementing new technology – it's about fostering an environment that values innovation, adaptability, and continuous improvement. Armed with this knowledge and insights I know for sure I am one step ahead of the competition. Only 17% of companies achieve the benefits they wanted from digital transformation – I don’t want us to become part of that statistic. The high failure rate is largely down to inadequate investment in people and a lack of clear strategy on how to deal with resistance.
The programme’s ‘seeing the bigger picture’ philosophy really chimed with my instincts. Tactics are nothing without a wider strategy, and that’s especially true at big, multinational companies like PokerStars, where you have dozens of different tribes that need to constantly be aligned to make digital transformation work.
Before, when I received a big project, I’d start with the governance and the tools and techniques I would use to make the project successful. After the programme, I now look at the operational details with a grander vision – the strategy guiding every decision and action. This fundamental shift – ‘strategising before execution’ – has become my mantra. I now meticulously select tactics, tools, and techniques that are aligned with the ultimate goal.
Learning online was super helpful. Spending time with programme peers who were mostly directors and global technology professionals, who shared stories of real-world challenges they've faced and the strategies they employed to overcome them, gave me practical insights and lessons that are hard to find in textbooks or traditional classroom settings. Learning from people’s successes and failures has given me foresight to navigate challenges I’ll face in my professional career. Learning online gave me flexibility too, which meant I could manage my time and balance learning with my busy career at PokerStars.
Without a doubt, the programme helped me bridge the gap between tactical and strategic project management. I can now see how my organisation’s programs and projects connect with organisational strategy and confidently feel I can lead peers, employees, and external stakeholders through the next stage of our digital transformation.
Leading Digital Transformation
Harness the digital era – develop the mindset senior executives need to successfully navigate the challenges digital transformations present.
