Project leadership specialist | Trainer at High Tech Institute | Managing Director, SYSMANO GmbH
Dr. Wilhelm Claussen is a German systems engineer and project leadership specialist with more than twenty-six years of international experience across semiconductor manufacturing, automotive engineering, photovoltaics and special-machine construction. He is founder and Managing Director of SYSMANO GmbH in Aachen and a trainer at High Tech Institute, where he teaches Project Leadership and the Project Leadership Masterclass. In 2024 High Tech Institute named him Teacher of the Year, an award based on participant evaluation scores across all editions.
Claussen acquired a doctorate in chemistry from Freie Universität Berlin, with his research on dendronized rod-like polymers. His doctoral training sharpened an analytical precision that he later applied to the far more complex systems of international semiconductor production, where the variables are human and organizational as much as technical.
Claussen began his industrial career in the mid-1990s in the Dresden wafer fab for DRAM memory chips at Siemens Semiconductors. Parallel to his work there he also acquired a degree in macro- economics. When the chip division was spun out as Infineon Technologies in 1999, he moved into process transfer and ramp-up, leading the transfer of wafer fabrication technology from Dresden to production sites in the United States, China and Taiwan. That period gave him his core conviction: that what separates a successful technology transfer from a failed one is never the process itself but the people leading it across organizational and cultural boundaries.
The decade that followed took him through program management at Qimonda in Munich and Richmond, Virginia, then into the photovoltaics industry at Roth & Rau, where he directed service and technology operations in Korea, running installation and commissioning projects for clients across India, Asia and Spain. He subsequently held project management roles at Solland Solar Cells, Holland Innovative and GreenTech Germany By the time he founded SYSMANO in 2018, he had led teams across four continents and accumulated a detailed map of the ways that projects fail — not through technical error but through missing leadership. During the SYSMANO years, he helped set up and structure SMART Photonics. As CTO, he led its lab-to-fab scale-up: from a startup working out of TU Eindhoven facilities to a small-scale manufacturing organization with full shift coverage. The challenge went beyond scaling the technology. While both the technology and the organizational model were still evolving, processes and responsibilities had to be stabilized as the company kept growing. During his time there, SMART Photonics grew from 18 to 101 employees. It is a clear example of managing uncertain technology and an immature organization in parallel, and systematically bringing both to the next level.
The central argument in his trainings is a clean separation between project management and project leadership. Management, as Claussen frames it, is administration: it builds the environment, the tools, the documentation. Leadership is about people — giving them focus, the right pace and a direction they can commit to. His most quoted formulation is direct: good project management with poor project leadership produces a well-documented disaster. What the training teaches instead are the four non-negotiables of project leadership: never lose the main line; always create an independent outside view of progress rather than accepting reported status; never delay a required decision and never treat silence as confirmation.
His trainings are deliberately method-agnostic. Claussen teaches the same principles whether participants work in Agile, Waterfall, Prince2 or any hybrid. Since 2022 he has brought that perspective to engineers at High Tech Institute from companies across the Dutch and European high-tech ecosystem.
Selected publications
Claussen, W.; Schluter, A.-D. “A poly(p-phenylene) decorated with Fréchet-type dendritic fragments of the first generation.” Macromolecular Rapid Communications, 16(1), 89–94 (1995). DOI: 10.1002/marc.1995.030160115
Claussen, W.; Schulte, N.; Schluter, A.-D. “Toward Dendrimers with Cylindrical Shape in Solution.” Macromolecular Rapid Communications, 16(12), 807–815 (1996).
Claussen, W.; et al. (Infineon Technologies). “Method for fabricating a semiconductor structure.” US Patent 6,245,640, granted 12 June 2001. Assignee: Siemens AG.
At High Tech Institute, Wilhelm Claussen teaches:
- Project Leadership – a one-day distillation of the essentials of project leadership for engineers and technical leads.
- Project Leadership Masterclass – a three-day program structured across project setup, managing complexity and successful delivery. Based on twenty-six years of international experience in semiconductor manufacturing, automotive engineering and special-machine construction. Offered once a year in Eindhoven.
What distinguishes his teaching is the combination of frontline project leadership experience across four continents and five industries with a framework that is immediately applicable regardless of development methodology, company size or technical domain.
Dr. Wilhelm Claussen is founder and Managing Director of SYSMANO GmbH and a trainer at High Tech Institute. He holds a doctorate in chemistry (Dr. rer. nat.) from Freie Universität Berlin (1996). High Tech Institute named him Teacher of the Year for 2024.
With the right attitude, the right focus, in the right team, you can do pretty much anything
''Dutch way of working' will be challenged by the age of integration.'
''Project management means having everything on the radar, project management is the art of setting priorities.'
For more info, you can go to Wilhelm Claussen’s LinkedIn.
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