What a Fractional Chief Technology Officer Does in the First Thirty Days.

If you hire part-time senior technology leadership for the first time, the hard part is picturing what you will have in a month. Not a strategy deck. Not a list of recommendations about tools. Something you can point at. This video describes the first thirty days of a fractional chief technology officer: three jobs, in a set order, and the one test that tells you whether the month worked. Everything on screen is a mock demo with sample data. The order matters, because each job depends on the one before it.

You cannot decide what to do about a vendor contract you have not read. You cannot sequence a roadmap against a team you have not met. And you cannot put discipline around spend you cannot see. So the first job is not a decision at all. It is an inventory. The inventory has five lists. The systems you run and how they connect. The team and what each person owns. The vendor contracts, with the dates they renew and the notice they need. The roadmap, such as it is. And the risks nobody has named out loud.

Every line gets an owner column, and the column is usually the revealing part. A system with no owner, a contract that renews in six weeks and sits in a former employee's inbox, a developer or an agency who is the only person who understands how a core process runs. The first thing a company learns in month one is how many things it depends on that nobody is accountable for. The second job is the one or two decisions that were stuck. Every company that brings in this kind of help has them: the platform choice that has been discussed for a year, the build-or-buy question on a core system, the hire that nobody wants to make alone.

They stay stuck because nobody has both the authority and the experience to make the call. The fractional officer makes the call, or prepares it so that the owner can, and writes down three things: who decided, by when, and the few facts that settled it. This is where the fee is usually earned, because the cost of a wrong early call is far larger than the cost of the month. The third job is a small amount of discipline, light enough to survive on a part-time schedule. A roadmap tied to what the business is trying to achieve, in an order that stops the team thrashing.

A hiring bar, so the next senior hire is judged against something written. And a monthly view of technology spend, so it stops surprising the finance lead. None of this needs forty hours a week. It needs seniority applied to the right decisions at the right moment, and then a rhythm that someone keeps. Here is the test at day thirty. Look at the inventory. What has a name against it that did not before? Which two decisions are made, by whom and when? What does the monthly view show that you could not have seen a month ago?

If the answer is a long list of recommendations and no names, the month did not work. If the answer is fewer things that nobody owns, two decisions closed and a rhythm someone keeps, it did. That is also how to tell whether you needed a fractional officer at all, or something else. You can make the month better before it starts. In week one, have five things ready. An access list for every system, including who holds the administrator login. Every vendor contract with its renewal date. An organisation chart that includes the outside developers and agencies, not only employees.

Last year's spend by system. And the list of decisions people keep postponing, in the words people actually use for them. The fifth item is the most useful. The decisions everyone postpones are the ones the first month is for, and the list is usually written down on a whiteboard somewhere, not in a document. It is just as useful to know when not to hire one. If your technology is stable, your decisions are small and easy to reverse, no hard-to-undo bet is coming, and a capable senior person already leads delivery well, a fractional officer adds altitude you cannot use yet.

The signs that it is time are decisions, not mess. A big platform bet that is hard to reverse. A developer or an agency who has become the single point of failure. A customer or an investor asking technical questions nobody can answer. A technical leader who has just left. Two or three of those together usually mean the problem has shifted from technology being hard to leadership having a gap. To sum up. The first thirty days are an inventory, one or two stuck decisions with an owner, and light discipline, in that order, and the measure is what now has a name against it.

We are CodeStringers, a Zoho authorised consulting partner. Our articles on when to hire a fractional chief technology officer and on what the role is are linked below, and a no-risk discovery starts with the inventory, so you see it before you decide anything.