Advisory Director — Network Performance Recovery

Advice before the commitment

The Advisory Director gives counsel to the people who decide. Reporting to the Country Managing Director for 18 months, you will help leadership reach better operating decisions on automation and process ownership; you will not take those decisions yourself. The value of the seat lies in the quality of the questions you ask before a commitment is made.

Automate the process someone owns

Automation in healthcare services goes wrong in a familiar way. A workflow is digitised before anyone has agreed who owns it, the system encodes the variation between sites, and the automation becomes the reason the variation can never be removed. The safer order is the reverse: settle who owns each core process, stabilise how it is done, and only then automate it. Your advice should keep leadership to that order, especially when an attractive proposal arrives early.

What you will advise on

You will help leadership agree how operational decisions are structured, including which thresholds local teams keep, and advise on the evidence used when governing spending, capacity and controls across countries. You will recommend which commitments should go on, wait or stop. You will push back on operating plans that leave exposure with no one answerable for it, and on investment cases that skip who must adopt the change, what it leans on and what failure would cost. You will also counsel on who should lead which processes, how problems should travel upward and how often progress and open questions are reported, helping leadership settle disagreements with site heads before positions set.

Eighteen months of advice that should show

Within the first ninety days the owners of the core workflows should be confirmed and an automation sequence proposed to the Country Managing Director. By month nine the automation proposals should have been reviewed against that ownership, with leadership advised to hold back any that lack a credible adoption or downside plan. By month 18 leadership should have reviewed network performance with you, and the automation sequence and process ownership model should have been tested and endorsed.

Experience that makes the advice credible

Your counsel carries weight because you have run things yourself: a crisis response, a joint venture and a turnaround, in organisations of at least $635 million in revenue and 4,000 people, operating in two or more countries. You can tell when a site genuinely needs to work differently and when it is simply repeating what it has always done. The seat asks for operating cadence at level 4 and operating model, network footprint and quality and safety at level 3. You protect controls that work, expose the cost of each exception and leave behind a stronger operating bench. You can describe an unresolved gap to a country managing director without letting uncertainty become delay. You would be frustrated here if you needed every country leader's agreement before advising that a commitment stop, or if you wanted influence without remaining answerable for the full 18 months.

From the Country Managing Director to the directors

The Country Managing Director speaks to you first, by video and in confidence, during week one. The following week, week two, you take on a working case set by the Audit Committee Chair. By the third week you are meeting the directors in person. A written view of each stage reaches you no later than three working days after it.