A retail chain with dozens of branches was facing a problem familiar to almost every growing company: an IT department that had spent years running in constant firefighting mode. No clear budget, no deadline anyone could actually count on. Management needed a fast, fundamental change — so they brought in an interim manager.
The brief sounded simple; the execution was anything but: get the most out of existing resources, find savings, and turn IT from a cost center into a business partner.
A Tough Audit and the Courage to Kill Projects in Progress
The interim manager didn’t start with a meeting or a strategy document. He started with an audit — going through contracts, processes, and costs, and within a week he knew exactly where the company was wasting money. Dozens of unused software licenses. Key know-how sitting with external vendors at rates that were costing the company dearly over the long run. And a string of projects with no clear owner, deadline, or budget.
What followed was a series of decisions that would have taken months without an interim manager’s mandate. Three low-return projects were shut down regardless of how much the company had already invested in them — because in business, sunk costs are sunk, no matter how strongly anyone once believed in the decision. Key functions, such as point-of-sale integration and merchandising reporting, were brought back in-house instead of relying on costly external partners. And a simple delivery process went in, with clear SLAs and planned release windows, so the business finally knew when it would get which feature, and at what cost.
This is exactly the kind of decision that shows the difference between a consultant and an interim CEO or another interim manager with full executive authority: a consultant writes a recommendation; an interim manager pushes it through himself and owns the result.
Why This Approach Works
The result wasn’t down to one brilliant call, but to a combination of principles that keep recurring in interim projects. Short decision cycles — the interim manager had the mandate to shift priorities almost immediately, without waiting for approval to work its way up through several layers of management. A focus on measurable data — every change was tracked and evaluated, so it was clear what was actually creating value and what wasn’t. And the combination of two roles that are often kept separate in practice: hands-on leadership, meaning personal involvement in staffing key positions, and process discipline in the form of SLAs, budgets, and roadmaps.
From Reactive IT to a Proactive Business Partner
Renegotiating contracts and cancelling overlapping licenses brought further savings. Introducing monitoring, automated alerts, and planned maintenance made it possible to prevent outages instead of firefighting after the damage was done. IT stopped being a department that only reacted to requests and started proposing pilot projects of its own — automating warehouse processes, faster onboarding of new suppliers, better reporting for the sales team.
The result: savings of more than CZK 16 million a year, shorter recovery times after outages, and a team that now makes decisions faster because the key know-how stays inside the company.
What to Take Away From This
A scenario like this shows up more and more often outside IT too — typically wherever there’s no clear ownership of budget and a company needs to establish discipline fast, without waiting months to hire someone new full-time. That’s exactly why companies increasingly bring in an interim CFO for these situations as well, someone who can go through costs, contracts, and investments across the whole company in a similar way, not just in a single department.
The hardest part of an intervention like this isn’t finding the savings — spreadsheets and audits can do that on their own. The hardest part is having the mandate and the courage to stop projects already underway, admit that sentiment toward earlier decisions is only making things more expensive, and take full responsibility for the new decisions. That’s the job an interim manager is hired for — not a consultant who makes a recommendation and leaves.
If your company is facing a similar situation — whether in IT, manufacturing, or finance — interim management can often deliver results measured in months, not years.
