Greater Hamburg Area
Seasoned IT executive with over 22 years of international leadership experience in transforming, restructuring, and growing IT service organizations. Proven track record of driving efficiency and profitability as Director Operations / Chief Operating Officer (COO). Scaling onsite / near-shore / off-shore IT Service delivery teams with robust processes based on standard operating procedures that incorporate automation and effectively leverage technology for best in class Managed Services (Operational Excellence). Operationalizing strategy with strong analytical skills, engaging stakeholders and motivating team members with clear communication and tangible goals aligned with ambitious corporate targets. Successfully built and developed customer relationships growing revenues and customer satisfaction (NPS) while successfully delivering complex IT outsourcing, global integration projects or digital transformation programs. Re-vitalized troubled engagements (turnaround management) with a pragmatic, hands-on approach that stresses customer focus, reliability and delivering on commitments. Skilled negotiator at C-level with the ability to align diverse stakeholders on common objectives, manage conflict and overcome obstacles with a results-oriented approach. Setting priorities, manage and mitigate risk effectively and decision making under uncertainty. Solid technical understanding (Cloud, SaaS, IaaS, IT-Security, Infrastructure), combined with comprehensive methodical knowledge (ITIL, Project Management) with excellent communication skills. Leading IT Service organizations with a structured style, incorporating efficient governance structures, developing teams and aligning responsibilities with business outcomes. Implemented KPI dashboards to support data-driven decisions and monitor financial performance to align with budgeting / forecasts. Supporting sales and revenue growth with competitive services, integrating vendors / partners complementing the portfolio, and thorough understanding of customer needs and industry trends. Strategic planning and execution as Managing Director (Geschäftsführer) or General Manager with a strong ability to motivate global teams (direct or matrix organization), foster cultural change, and achieve sustainable business outcomes. Highly resilient and adaptable.
Leading a team of 750 IT Service professionals in Germany delivering a comprehensive Managed Services / Project Portfolio to 100+ customers from SMEs to global corporations. Experis is a wholly owned subsidiary ManpowerGroup providing IT Solutions & IT Resourcing for Cloud, Enterprise Applications, Digital Workplace & Cyber Security. The vision was set and corporate guidance was clear: wind-down the multi-million business in 12 months, exit all (several hundreds) customer contracts and let all 750 employees go. We delivered. Above and beyond expectations. Communication to the team was tough. My leadership team and I handled a lot of frustration, bitterness and disbelief, but we quickly established our purpose: let’s help the people find a future job while we’re doing our best to execute the wind-down. Negotiations with the workers council were difficult, but eventually resulted in in a grudgingly acceptable social plan that was a basis for resource allocation to deliver on our commitments (shrinking month over month). Additional my team was creative: supporting associates to freshen up their CVs, prepare for interviews and inviting other companies to present their job openings. As a result, the majority of our team had a new job before their last day. I was thoroughly impressed by the motivation and pride we could instill with the team. Consequently, customers praised their efforts. We went out of business with 0 contract penalties and all obligations met. Our sales guys and I went out informing our customers. We introduced trusted partners, negotiated transition timelines and handled knowledge transfer successfully minimizing service disruptions. Handling several complex and time-critical negotiations in parallel was intense and satisfying as things came together. I learned to make decisions during uncertainty. I understood what resilience means. My problem solving skills level up. I am proud of what we achieved as a team during a difficult situation.
I liked the challenge that came with this role: grow revenues & profit by integrating teams / processes (post-merger), establishing governance, increasing delivery efficiency. Doing this at scale in a short time-frame with 800+ associates through 10 direct reports for the multi-multimillion IT Services and project portfolio was ambitious. I didn’t hesitate to build a KPI dashboard, adjust internal processes and restructured some departments. With the input of my leadership team and building on my own experience, we implemented cost controls and made (team) leaders accountable for enforcing quality standards, efficient resource allocation and meeting financial & contract obligations. I engaged with the Sales and Solution Design team to review and streamline the service portfolio and complement our service offerings by negotiating a number of partnerships with vendors. Several initiatives required negotiations with the various workers councils. While we eventually could find arrangements to complete a few changes, others had to be moved to a larger transformation plan for later. Regularly engaging with customers from technical to C-level was gratifying. Despite initial complaints on service quality, when those complaints were reliably resolved, they were full of praise for the team. Operational excellence started to show, team engagement and motivation began to improve. All loss-making engagements were eliminated, either through efficiency improvements, negotiations or a few exits. Success? Too little too late. Revenue kept declining year over year despite a noticeable increase (15-20%) in cross- and upselling on existing engagements. New wins couldn’t sufficiently replace the end-of-life contracts. When we presented the business case for a sustainable transformation to the corporate board to address the fundamental obstacles identified, the decision was to evaluate M&A options and if those fail, to wind down the business.
Managing Director Unisys Germany GmbH (Geschäftsführer) for the German entity with 250 associates, serving large corporations and public customers with IT Managed Services and projects across datacenters, infrastructure, cloud, end user devices, SaaS solutions and business applications. Aside from legal representation and my signature on lots of documents , I handled three primary duties as the accountable country leader: Strategic planning with the global leadership and local execution in alignment with the business units leads (global matrix organization). This included regular communication with other European country heads and paying attention to national regulations that influenced Unisys’ business and customers in Germany. Communication with and motivation of local associates, as the “Lead Associate” for the country made up about half of those. As the highest ranking local representative, I engaged in support for business development, sales initiatives and C-level escalations. This included steering committee meetings with key customers, relationship management and facilitating reliable issue and conflict resolution with the global delivery teams. I spent time on plenty of calls educating the international team as well as coaching local consultants and leadership on relevant contract clauses or financial aspects. Finally, negotiations with the local workers council to finalize local implementation of global processes and procedures took up some time as well, though it helped that most of the requirements were driven by my other role as Client Executive to the European Central Bank (ECB) at the time.
Taking over the role of Client Executive (Key Account Manager) for the European Central Bank (ECB) was kind of a home-run for me given my previous work as Senior Delivery Director to build the global delivery team: profound customer relationships, deep understanding of the delivery organization and thorough knowledge of the complex contract. With all that well established, I could focus immediately on the dramatically changing circumstances due to the Corona pandemic and discuss with the customer how to adjust their infrastructure and our IT managed services. We discussed several projects and aligned priorities. With my operational / technical understanding and my regular contact to our various stakeholders with ECB, I became their trusted advisor – with the help of my well versed solution architect. Internal stakeholders were impressed with the business growth achieved, adding millions of additional revenue and increasing profits. Consequently the team grew significantly (400+ associates) to absorb the additional services, scaling from the solid foundation. One success factor certainly was that together with my program manager we had created a project management organization, handling multiple projects in parallel, that aligned well with the service delivery team to smoothly shift project results into ongoing operations. With annual revenues more than doubled within 18 months, ECB became Unisys’ 3rd largest global account and a reference for operational excellence.
I was between meetings in Kopenhagen, when I got the call from our European MD: “Markus, we’ve won the Managed Services contract for the ECB and I want you to build the team to deliver it.” This was a challenge to my liking: a first time outsourcing contract written by a 3rd party consultancy, a demanding public customer and a new near-shore delivery center. It turned out that on top of that, a service delivery transformation and renewal of existing infrastructure (servers, network switches, firewalls, …) was expected. After 9 months of transition to establish processes and procedures, build and train the team - onsite and near-shore – we took on the service as planned. Scaling the team with associates from all over Europe and dozens of new hires was challenging. I engaged with global managers of the matrix organization setting expectations as well as sharing key elements of the contract for them to customize their standard operating procedures (SOPs). With my hands-on approach, I engaged with team members steadily building commitment and increasing motivation. Another important aspect of the successful set-up were the contract negotiation with and seamless operational integration of several external delivery partners to complement our own services. To measure the contractual quality KPIs, I worked directly with a couple of SMEs to set up a fully automated SLA dashboard showing daily progress. This enabled the team leaders to monitor their performance and take corrective action as required. With service operations running, a competent team in place – and able to handle attrition – I focused on increasing delivery efficiencies and reducing cost. Executing cost reductions and encouraging automation required quite a bit of skill of influencing the managers in the global matrix organization. When the customer initiated a contract compliance review some time into the contract, we quickly resolved a number findings to eventually achieve a “fully compliant” rating.
Consultant for Outsourcing of IT services at private bank. Consultant in technical integration team at Telecommunications Company.