Technical Program Managers in Germany

• Project management and consulting services with a focus on IT interim management: digitalization of corporate management, including processes and applications
• Assessment of the entire IT infrastructure, including applications, core processes and contracts, including cost optimization
• Evaluation and implementation of solutions to promote digitalization in the company in the areas of property management, CRM, invoice review and approval processes, smart metering, DMS and time tracking
• Digitization of file folders and introduction of SharePoint and Microsoft Teams as central document and communication platforms
• Design and delivery of an AI workshop, including the rollout of AI tools to increase efficiency and transparency in key business processes
• Preparation of training materials and delivery of user training for newly introduced digital processes and solutions

International Family-Owned Company | Revenue of more than 1 billion EUR | CONFIDENTIAL

• Established and operationalized a company-wide PMO; took over the initial management function during ongoing operations.
• Structured a portfolio of more than 15 strategic transformation initiatives across several countries and functions.
• Designed project intake, decision levels, responsibilities and regular steering meetings; management reporting as well as risk and dependency management.
• Established the PMO environment with Microsoft 365, Planner Premium, Teams, SharePoint and Forms; planned reporting and prepared the structured handover to an internal PMO organization.

In-house consulting provider and driver of transformation within the group, multi-stakeholder environment and C-level.

Realignment and stabilization of a cross-functional transformation and scaling program within the group. Sharpening the target picture, priorities, and set of measures, as well as building reliable governance, planning, and steering structures. Structuring roles, responsibilities, and strategic initiatives while including AI and IT automation ideas.

• Designed program realignment and project portfolio management

• Developed strategy model and target picture for IT projects

• Structured portfolio, roadmap, and priorities

• Established governance and regular meetings

• Worked out operating model for flagship projects

• Assessed AI and automation ideas

• Clarified roles and responsibilities

• Implemented change measures

• Developed, moderated, and evaluated workshops

• Transformed 17 initiatives into a steering model

• Increased transparency and decision-making ability

• Strengthened commitment in steering

• Sharpened the operating model structurally

• Integrated three top-5 institutes

• Involved over 80% of stakeholders

• Governance

• Portfolio steering (PPM)

• Change management

• Artificial intelligence

• Workflow automation

• AI use case assessment

• Confluence

• Jira

• Stakeholder management

• Project management for software projects in the brake control unit area with a focus on deadlines, costs, and quality.
• Planning, control, and reporting of project progress, risks, dependencies, and work packages.
• Planning and tracking of work packages using PTC Integrity.
• Organizing and moderating customer meetings as well as coordination with internal departments, external suppliers, and third parties.
• Creating and maintaining project documentation according to Automotive SPICE requirements as well as management reporting.

Project: Design and implementation of an AI product for four business use cases

Project management for an AI project at a leading provider of large-scale catering and food services, where a production-ready AI product for four use cases was implemented together with an external development partner: automated briefings based on CRM and document data, voice-based capture and structuring of reports, detection and consolidation of duplicates in master data, and data-based market analyses. A key focus was a data-protection-compliant architecture that passed the internal IT security review and enabled production use.

• Translation of business requirements into clearly defined AI use cases with a focused product scope and clear value proposition
• Selection and evaluation of models and architecture options for text extraction, speech-to-text, and context enrichment from business systems, including LLM integration, function calling, and retrieval
• Development and implementation of an architecture with European hosting, data minimization, and masking of personal data as a prerequisite for approval
• Management of interfaces between business departments, IT, IT security, and the external development partner under restrictive data access conditions
• Coordination with the CIO and executive management levels on data access, risk assessment, and approval decisions
• Preparation for the transition to production use

• Drove two cross-functional engineering teams within the SAFe framework to deliver backend and integration solutions for Visa’s Terminal Management and Cybersource Onboarding platforms
• Served as Program Coach for ten teams within the Platform Services organization, advancing Agile maturity, delivery alignment, and a culture of continuous improvement
• Orchestrated Agile ceremonies including Product Manager syncs, metrics reviews, inspect-and-adapt sessions, system demos, and leadership workshops to strengthen transparency, collaboration, and delivery performance
• Championed the rollout of the Re-imagine Work@Visa scaled delivery framework within the Agile Transformation Team, improving collaboration and delivery predictability
• Increased release frequency 18× per quarter by synchronizing distributed teams and developing a comprehensive release guide
• Partnered with the Release Manager to standardize deployments across Visa Data Center, AWS, and Mobile platforms
• Led teams to close all security findings and embed remediation into BAU, achieving zero open issues by mid-2024
• Directed the Security Findings Program across the portfolio, ensuring visibility, accountability, and progress tracking
• Supported the roll out of the OKR framework and led quarterly reviews to align execution with business goals
• Strengthened communication across distributed teams, removed blockers, and advocated for continuous improvement and automation
• Delivered on demand workshops for teams with raising maturity and adoption of best practices
• Co-founded a Center of Excellence and Agile Community of Practice to promote continuous learning and alignment
• Partnered with SRE and InfoSec teams on multi-region rollout and security initiatives to enhance reliability and compliance

GenAI – Chat & Voicebot

Setup of a GenAI solution with a knowledge base as well as chat and voicebots.

• Definition of use cases and chat/voicebot functionalities
• Project setup for cloud, knowledge base, LLMs and RAG
• AI guardrails, IAM concept
• Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC)

Result:

Setup of an enterprise GenAI solution with knowledge base, chat/voicebots, IAM and governance.

Product Manager for the Maybach and S-Class center consoles. Coordination of development, production, quality, suppliers and OEM

• Converts natural language into JQL using RAG and pgvector. Returns structured JSON with a query, chart spec, and plain-text answer. A two-stage router answers general questions without touching the JQL pipeline at all.
• Interchangeable LLM backends: Ollama, vLLM, Groq, Anthropic Claude, AWS Bedrock - switchable at runtime, no code changes. Self-healing JQL: on Jira validation failure, feeds error back to LLM, retries up to 4 times. OCI Vault for secrets. Deployed on Oracle Cloud A1 with GPU inference over Tailscale private network. Open source.

AI Assistance and Target Vision for Partially Autonomous Energy Portfolio Management

Building an AI control layer directly on the up-to-date daily live portfolio of a large energy provider — not as an isolated pilot, but as an operational extension of the existing DB1 and portfolio management. The goal is the gradual development from assistance through monitoring/alerting to analysis agents with Human-in-the-Loop approvals, supplemented by a role-specific System of Engagement alongside the BI System of Record. At the same time, the business case, target vision and management pitch compared with static monthly reporting are being developed.

• AI control layer: Design and build on the existing live portfolio data product (several million contracts) — development stages assistance → monitoring/alerting → agents with Human-in-the-Loop approvals.
• LLM-supported data analysis: Semantic queries, SQL/tool integration and additional RAG components based on portfolio, plan-versus-actual and data quality data (Azure OpenAI, Snowflake), with drill-downs to individual contract level.
• Analysis agents: Multi-stage agents for variance and driver analyses of churn, price adjustments, volumes and procurement costs.
• Views concept: Role-specific interfaces for business units, management and C-level as a System of Engagement alongside the BI System of Record.
• Business case & pitch: Target vision and cost-benefit argumentation compared with static monthly reporting.
• LLM setup (privacy & security): Coordination with IT Security and Data Protection — EU region, data separation and approval processes.
• Agent architecture: Multi-stage agent pipelines (analysis → validation → summary) with documented data sources, tool calls, review steps and source references for each statement.
• Data foundation: Built on the up-to-date daily DB1 data product (Snowflake, dbt) — portfolio, plan-versus-actual and data quality metrics as the common basis for all AI analyses.
• Guardrails & evaluation: Evaluation and approval processes for LLM responses relating to management-relevant statements — test sets, metrics and human review.
• Prototyping & validation: Iterative validation of agent responses with the business unit — test question catalogue, feedback loops and response quality for each release.
• Roadmap & development stages: Detailed stages from assistance → monitoring/alerting → partially autonomous management, including transition criteria and governance for each stage.
• Integration: Integration into the existing BI and data landscape — BI remains the System of Record, while the AI layer provides interactive drill-down paths as the System of Engagement.
• Enablement: Enablement of business users — prompting guides, training and an operating model for ongoing use.
• Management: Coordination of business units, Data Engineering, IT Security and Data Protection.
• Change Management: Communication and expectation management with business units and management throughout the development stages.

Results:

• Built on an existing up-to-date daily data product with several million contracts
• Established an LLM setup coordinated with Data Protection and IT Security in the EU region, including data separation and approvals
• Defined three development stages through to partially autonomous management
• Designed role-specific views for business units, management and C-level
• Developed the business case and management pitch for the development stages
• Established an iterative response-quality validation process with the business unit
• Designed the operating model for assistance operations and initiated validation

Stack: Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Snowflake, dbt, React, TypeScript, Entra ID, RAG, Agentic AI, analysis agents, Human-in-the-Loop, Prompt Engineering, LLM Evaluation, LLMOps, GDPR / EU region, Azure DevOps, Python, SQL, Change Management

• Holistic responsibility for modernizing and expanding federal networks and upgrading critical data center and telecom infrastructure in the high-security agency environment of BDBOS
• Planning and management of the expansion of national BOS network infrastructure in the VS-NfD/KRITIS environment with technical decision authority at the architecture and component level (Cisco, Layer 2/3, WAN redundancy)
• Planning, tendering (EVB-IT/UVgO) and oversight of the upgrade of security-critical telecom infrastructure for emergency call 110/112 (ACD)
• Capacity planning, rack integration, structured cabling, power supply, cooling concept (CRAC/In-Row) and DCIM monitoring for data center expansion
• Building the IT department from scratch: structures, governance, processes, team recruiting, vendor selection and long-term IT strategy
• Planning and managing infrastructure and application migrations: migration strategies, batch planning, hypercare stabilization and rollback concepts
• Creating vendor-neutral specifications (telecom systems, signature solutions) according to EVB-IT and UVgO; contract award and vendor management
• Setting up a secure IT environment according to BSI basic protection, ISO 27001 and VS-NfD; developing IT security concepts and CMDB analyses
• Hands-on program leadership: decision papers for management and steering committees, risk management, reporting and change request control

• Led performance engineering strategy for MS Dynamics 365 retail transformation
• Coordinated 25+ engineers across multiple delivery streams
• Identified and resolved system bottlenecks, reducing critical performance issues by 40% pre-go-live
• Delivered executive performance dashboards enabling data-driven release decisions

• Technical program ownership for the IPv6 migration at DRV RP and DRV BW, with a focus on migration planning, execution structure, and cross-functional technical coordination.
• Designed and implemented an operational control model with dashboard, action board, KPI portfolio, risk register, and decision index to translate technical topics into structured delivery artifacts.
• Coordinated technical groundwork for architecture and rollout across IPv6 addressing, segmentation, dual-stack target design, test-lab planning, and cross-team dependencies.
• Supported security and compliance-related requirements in the context of BSI, NIS2, and critical infrastructure, translating them into traceable evidence, risks, and management reporting.
• Achievement: Established a reusable intake-to-governance workflow for systematically capturing technical actions, risks, open issues, and evidence requirements.
• Achievement: Created an operational baseline for technical program execution with measurable KPIs, clear ownership, and transparent decision support.

• Developed and implemented a security package for the Portus SOA framework
• Security concept to protect web services