Overall responsible for IT Technical Services in the DACH region, including Workplace Services, Infrastructure Services, and IT Service & IT Automation Management; direct reporting to the DACH CIO.
Unit of 52 employees organized in three departments and seven teams with nine leaders.
Authorized officer responsible for budget, budget planning and monitoring, and identifying cost-saving opportunities.
Develop regional IT strategy in line with group IT strategy.
Partner and supplier management.
Implement processes and procedures, including KPIs, to ensure smooth IT operations.
Direct reporting to the Group CTO (UK) from 05/2016 – 01/2018.
Integrate and expand the group in Scandinavia.
Introduce agile project management methods.
Build DevOps capabilities.
Expand service design and delivery functions.
Introduce IT vendor management.
08/2017 appointed authorized signatory for Lowell Service Center GmbH.
Integrate the DACH Technical Services into the group organization.
Budget responsibility approx. €8.8M p.a.
Build the IT Process Automation team.
Group Industrialised Infrastructure Project (06/2017 – 12/2020):
Consolidate six existing data centers in the UK, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, and Germany into a joint managed service operation.
For DACH, select Vodafone Cloud & Security to migrate the entire IT infrastructure to a customer-specific public cloud and design a hybrid cloud approach to leverage scale-out potential in Microsoft Azure.
Role: IT business owner for DACH; report to group CIO and regional CIOs to coordinate dependencies with UK and Nordics regions.
Team: ~35 internal and 25 external staff plus various application migration vendors. Budget €18M.
Activities:
Vendor selection: prepare RFP, define and align project scope; select vendors on commercial, strategic, and technical criteria.
Contract: negotiate and draft a group-wide UK-law contract in English; detail service terms and commercial conditions (8 months, mainly in Manchester); plan acceptance for a 60-month contract; total commitment €16M.
Build project team and adapt IT org: recruit project team (PM, analysts, technical specialists); add technical design and delivery experts internally; appoint lead engineer/vendor manager; train and develop existing infrastructure and network teams; involve works council and draft an operations agreement.
Transition: align and approve technical designs from HLD to LLD as contract basis; oversee delivery and configuration; develop and approve service details; define service catalog and data center services; implement ITIL processes and adapt internal communication; set up incident, problem, change, capacity, and availability management.
Transformation: plan and prepare internal application migration; ready existing application servers; coordinate software vendors and partners; establish redundant migration paths.
Escalation management: a 9-month delay by the provider led to a €2.1M settlement agreement and a realistic replan with discounts to complete successfully.
Technical environment:
Private cloud: Compute (Cisco UCS, Oracle Exadata), Network & Security (Cisco Nexus, F5 BigIP), Storage (EMC VMax, EMC Isilon), Hypervisor (VMware vSphere, Horizon View).
Hybrid cloud: Compute (MS Azure), Network (Azure DC Connect), Hypervisor (Kubernetes).
DevOps stack: Atlassian, Azure DevOps.
Methods: Traditional PMI project management.
New receivables management platform development (03/2019 – 12/2020):
Aim to evolve the fragmented software base into a microservices platform to meet digitalization and automation needs; shift to a product-centric agile organization.
Role: Lead technical delivery in core team (product management, solution design, component management, technical delivery). Ensure infrastructure for component development and production operations.
Team: 25 internal IT staff and up to 200 offshore/nearshore developers. Budget €22M.
Activities:
Plan and ensure production readiness of technical components.
Build DevOps support for component teams.
Provide dev environments for offshore/nearshore teams under strict data protection and cyber security rules.
Adapt IT service organization to the new product-centric structure.
Technical environment: MS Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, Bamboo, Splunk.
Methods: Custom “Way of Working”, Scrum, DevOps.
M&A IT integration of 4 companies (03/2016 – 12/2018):
Acquire a small group of three companies in 2016 and integrate an Austrian firm with its own software subsidiary in 2017.
Role: Overall responsible for IT integration.
Team: 25 operational IT staff in the companies and 5 developers in the Austrian software firm.
Activities:
IT due diligence: tech and organizational assessment; review license and maintenance contracts; consolidate IT costs; recommend and cost integration; highlight risks with mitigation plans.
Organizational integration: merge IT staff into central IT; involve works council for agreements; adjust service models and finalize SLAs; review and adapt existing vendor relationships; unify license contracts; centralize software asset management; consolidate technical docs.
Technical integration: connect sites to central MPLS; stabilize data center infrastructure and provide central services; integrate into central IT security.
Tech environment: various legacy IT systems.
Methods: Traditional PMI project management.
Lead overall IT integration project in Potsdam.
As a consultant and interim manager, I support companies in all aspects of IT infrastructure operations. Process consulting and design, provider management and provider development, as well as leading IT operations organizations are the focus of my freelance work today. In the 20 years before that at a financial services provider, I had the chance to develop the company’s IT and shape many changes. That company started as a startup with a classic founder loan and grew through strong organic and inorganic growth with venture capital investors. It eventually became a pan-European group with private equity funding. During a 3–5 year turnaround, constant organizational developments and changes in management and ownership, I experienced the classic lifecycle of a company with all its ups and downs. This included shaping my area of responsibility. I gained experience in classic line organizations in various roles and learned the pros and cons of matrix organizations and different project structures and methods. Through the group’s internationalization, I expanded my skills with international experience. With direct reporting lines to the Group CTO and Group CIO and close cooperation with colleagues from the UK and Scandinavia, I analyzed different working styles to highlight and fix communication and organizational gaps. Recruiting employees, managers and project teams, as well as developing existing colleagues, was a key part of my work.
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