Interim IT director for companies in Germany

What an interim IT director does

An interim IT director leads a company’s IT full time for a limited period, for example between the departure of one IT head and the start of the next. The job ends with a handover to the permanent head.

Job profiles of the German IT-Leiter put the operation of network, servers and workplaces, IT security, the business applications, the budget, the providers and the team into that position (profiling-institut.de). None of these tasks pauses while the position is empty. Without a lead, decisions pile up with the management, and the provider waits for orders.

Handover checklist for the gap between two IT heads

I work through this list in the first weeks. It becomes the handover document for your new IT head.

In the first week

• Admin accounts: who holds them, and the passwords moved into a vault your company controls.
• Backups: where they run, and one restore tested.
• Providers: contact person, contract and emergency number of each.
• Incidents and requests: what is open, and who works on it.
• The departing IT head’s access: removed on the last working day, together with the return of devices.

In the first month

• Systems: servers, cloud accounts and applications, with the people who use them.
• Contracts and licenses: terms, notice periods and costs.
• Projects under way: goal, owner, next date, budget spent.
• Risks: systems that only one person understands, missing updates, missing documentation.
• Team: a talk with each IT staff member about their work and what they need.

Before the successor starts

• The handover document with systems, access, contracts, projects and risks.
• A log of the decisions I took, with the reasons.
• The decisions I left open for the new IT head.
• The overlap agreed with you.

Taking over a running system at a Frankfurt fintech

In January 2022 I joined the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital and took over the operation of its blockchain infrastructure in several data centers. The company was a node operator in an oracle network that supplies market data to smart contracts, with nodes for Ethereum and Avalanche.

I took over the operation and the internal documentation, managed the servers myself and built up the team for them. Later I moved the infrastructure from Azure to another cloud provider and set up a failover site. As Chief Information Officer from January 2023 I coordinated the infrastructure team with the development, product and sales teams. Details: Node operations and a cloud migration with failover.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke from Frankfurt. I have led IT as Chief Information Officer, IT Team Lead and Managing Director, and today I work as AI Engineer on a client’s platform. I am interested in open-source AI models that a company runs on its own servers. I work in German and English. Details: Career stages.