# Fractional CAIO mandate template

Prepared by Paul Okhrem. Free to adapt with attribution under CC BY 4.0. This planning template is not a signed contract, legal opinion or guarantee of AI results.

## 1. Business decision and sponsor
- Name the client, executive sponsor, reporting line and internal delivery owner.
- State the decision this mandate must support. Give its deadline and baseline.
- Identify the teams, workflows and countries in scope. List exclusions.

## 2. Decision rights
- The CEO or named sponsor approves investment and accepts business risk.
- The fractional CAIO proposes priorities, governance and delivery gates.
- Legal, security, privacy and regulated-function owners retain their specialist approvals.
- Name who can approve a pilot, allow a production release, pause a system and accept residual risk.
- Record spending limits and actions that always require human approval.

## 3. Time and commercial scope
- Confirm the meeting schedule, preparation time, review work and response expectations.
- Paul Okhrem's published fractional terms are USD 30,000 per month for at least six months, about one day per week and up to 30 hours per month. The minimum total is USD 180,000.
- Agree additional time before it is used. Engineering, software, cloud and specialist legal costs are separately scoped.
- Confirm named delivery people. An executive mandate does not include unlimited development capacity.

## 4. First 180 days
- Days 1–30: agree the baseline, risk inventory, owners and decision calendar.
- Days 31–60: choose a small set of use cases and define evaluation and stop rules.
- Days 61–90: review pilot evidence, costs, user adoption and control gaps.
- Days 91–180: scale, change or stop each use case; transfer ownership and operating documents.
- Treat this sequence as a planning example. Adjust dates to the actual scope and dependencies.

## 5. Review and evidence
- For each use case, record the metric, baseline date, data owner and measurement method.
- Separate observed results, estimates and forecasts. Include full operating cost.
- Schedule monthly sponsor reviews and a formal mandate review date.
- Define acceptance evidence before work begins. Do not equate a demo with production readiness.

## 6. Conflicts and provider selection
- Record relevant company roles and related-party interests.
- The client approves vendors; related-company engineering work needs a separate scope and transparent selection.
- Keep credentials, data access and repositories under client control.

## 7. Handover and exit
- Name the permanent owner and the decision rights they will receive.
- List the roadmap, risk register, evaluation results, vendor records and operating procedures to hand over.
- Agree the final review, access revocation, knowledge-transfer sessions and unresolved-risk log.
- Record what would justify renewal, a full-time hire or closure of the mandate.

## Next step
Use the template with your executive sponsor before buying advice. For a scoped discussion with Paul Okhrem, see https://paul-okhrem.com/fractional-caio/ or email paul@paul-okhrem.com. No email is needed to download or use this document.