Interim Transformation Executive — Delivery Programme

Eighteen months of deciding what gets funded

Start at the end. By month 18, funding for the transformation portfolio should run through a standing reporting rhythm that nobody has to reinvent each quarter, and the capacity released by stopping weaker initiatives should be visibly at work on the ones that matter most. Everything earlier serves that.

The first ninety days set the terms. Funding priorities across the portfolio need to be agreed, along with the thresholds below which local leaders decide for themselves, and each initiative needs someone who answers for it. That sounds administrative; it is not. It is the point at which a portfolio stops being a list of ambitions and becomes a set of competing claims on engineering time, maintenance windows and management attention.

Around month nine, every initiative should have been reviewed and either kept, held or stopped, and funding should have been withheld wherever the case could not say who would adopt the change or what the downside looked like. This is usually the hardest stretch. The initiatives losing money have sponsors, and the evidence for a decision is rarely complete at the moment the decision falls due.

Authority to say no, and to make it hold

Because this is an interim executive seat, the decisions are yours rather than advice to someone else. Reporting to the Regional President, you will set how portfolio decisions are made and what stays with local leaders. The standard of proof that unlocks money, engineering time and control changes will be yours to set. Initiatives proceed or stop on your call, and a proposal that dumps cost or risk on a plant or department that never agreed to take it goes back to its sponsor. You will decline investment where the case is silent on take-up, on what it depends on, or on what happens if it fails. You will approve who leads each part of the portfolio and the route for unresolved issues, settle disputes with plant and business heads before funds are released, and decide how often the board is shown progress and still-open choices.

Funding choices made under pressure

You have made transformation choices in industrial manufacturing where waiting carried a measurable cost. The businesses concerned should have reached revenue of $515 million or more, with no fewer than 1,300 people across six or more countries. Your record in cost transformation, professionalisation and turnaround should include at least one occasion when the operating data was patchy, you committed anyway to a call you could undo, and you narrowed it as better figures came in. Strategy formation at level 4 matters most, supported by level-3 strength in PMO governance, value cases and change adoption.

The Regional President will be interested in a time you refused funding because adoption and downside were unnamed, and in what you rebuilt afterwards. Refusal on its own is easy. Leaving behind the transformation capacity to do the work properly is what distinguishes the strongest candidates. When something is still unknown you can tell the Regional President candidly, without dressing it up or letting it stall the decision, and you intend to own the portfolio's outcome for all 18 months, not only while the early choices are being made.

Three weeks from first call to committee

The whole process fits inside three weeks. Week one opens with the Regional President on a confidential video link; week two brings the Regional President back with a case for the two of you to work through; and in week three you sit down in person with the investment committee. Each step is followed by a written response from us within two working days.