Speaker Details

Mike Portworsnick is CEO and founder of Change Factory AG in Lucerne, Switzerland. His career spans more than 25 years and two worlds: large international infrastructure, and the consulting work that follows when organizations have to change.

He started in telecommunications and internet infrastructure – project manager for GE Capital’s European network, chief internet architect for a pan-European IP backbone at Unisource Carrier Services and later at Energis in Poland, director of networks and executive board member at AOL Germany, and CTO at Telefónica Germany. Large budgets, teams across several countries, regulators at the table. That is where he learned what a portfolio really costs when nobody keeps the overview.

In 2005 he joined the board of AnyWeb AG in Zurich, where he built up the IT Service Management division and grew its revenue fifteenfold in six years. In 2011 he founded iperience GmbH, and in 2015 the business that is Change Factory today.

Change Factory helps organizations turn project management into a driver of change: PPM assessments, lean processes, governance people follow, and the implementation of the Swiss PPM software PQFORCE, as a sales and implementation partner of INTRASOFT AG. Clients range from SMEs to large organizations – banks, cantonal administrations, state-owned enterprises, hospitals, industrial and construction companies across Switzerland and the DACH region. In these environments, data sovereignty, auditability and Swiss hosting are not marketing arguments but requirements.

Mike holds a Dipl.-Ing. in Computer Engineering and an M.Sc. in Strategic Management, and is a certified NLP Master Practitioner. He is a critical thinker, change coach and author of Board Strategy and Performance Management at Swiss Medium-Sized Companies. He prefers the uncomfortable question to the comfortable answer – convinced that most projects fail not for technical reasons, but because decision-makers trust numbers that have not earned it.