Interim Transformation Executive — Recovery

Deciding what loses funding

Setting funding priorities is easy to describe and hard to do, because the real decision is never what to fund first. It is what to fund less, later, or not at all. The Interim Transformation Executive is appointed for 18 months, reporting to the Investment Committee, to make those decisions across the organisation's initiatives and to make them hold. In a venture-backed business, where capital and senior capacity are both finite and investors expect them to be used with purpose, the discipline matters a great deal.

The authority to reallocate

The authority here is executive. The transformation executive decides which funding calls are made centrally and which local leaders may make within a threshold, and what evidence an initiative must show to keep its budget in each market. Money can be withdrawn from one initiative and given to another. Any proposal that leaves another team holding its cost without that team's agreement is stopped, and requests for funding that are silent on who will use the result, what it needs from elsewhere, or how it could fail are turned away. The executive picks the leadership and the escalation route, and resolves standoffs between the Investment Committee and operating leaders.

The judgement lies in the criteria. A funding decision that rests on who argued most persuasively will be relitigated every quarter; one that rests on agreed criteria applied the same way to every initiative can survive disagreement. Writing those criteria well, so that they are strict enough to remove things and fair enough to be accepted, is the core of the work.

Eighteen months of funding discipline

In the first ninety days funding priorities should be set across all initiatives, with the criteria for continuing, pausing or ending each one agreed with the Investment Committee. By around month nine funding should have moved to the priority initiatives, and cases that leave out take-up, dependencies or downside should have been refused. By month 18 the Investment Committee should be running its own funding cycle on agreed evidence, with initiative owners accountable for results.

Experience that has been tested

Your experience covers seven or more countries, in organisations no smaller than $250 million in revenue and 1,000 people, and you can tell necessary local judgement from variation that has simply been protected. You have traced an exception to the person who really pays for it before letting it run on. You have refused funding when take-up and downside went unnamed, then rebuilt the capacity to do better. Digital transformation, professionalisation and turnaround are the three experiences the committee will press on. You should bring strategy formation at level 4; at level 3, value case discipline, skill in driving adoption, and PMO governance.

Committee, chair, committee again

During week one you meet the Investment Committee privately by video. A funding case from the Audit Committee Chair follows in week two. In week three you return to the investment committee, this time in person, for a discussion. A reply on each stage comes within four working days.