Interim Chief Financial Officer — Scale (Energy and Utilities)

Working back from the next plan

The clearest measure of success for this Interim Chief Financial Officer arrives at month 12, when the next planning cycle is built on cash and performance evidence that the business trusts, and a finance leadership team is in place to carry it on. Two earlier points make that possible. Over the first ninety days, ownership of cash, the measures used to judge performance and the planning-cycle timetable should be settled with the Group Chief Financial Officer. Around month nine, cash and performance reviews should be running on a fixed rhythm, and every inherited commitment should have been tested before it is allowed into the next plan.

Planning cycles have a way of carrying forward last year's assumptions with fresh dates. Cash discipline means asking, line by line, what each commitment consumes, when, and on whose authority, and performance discipline means agreeing in advance what result would justify continuing it. Neither is glamorous, and both are easier to establish before the planning season starts than during it.

Executive authority over the finance agenda

The role carries interim executive authority and reports to the Group Chief Financial Officer. You will set the finance decision rights and the limits left to local leaders, and pick the cash and performance measures that every investment, capacity request and control exception across markets must answer to. You rule on which inherited commitments proceed, which wait and which end. You can halt a request that offloads cost or risk onto another budget without its holder's consent, and decline investment where the case does not address adoption, what it relies on or the downside. You approve the finance leadership structure and the escalation routes, and settle differences with the operating side before any money moves.

The finance leader for the year

Your experience includes a business with revenue of $805 million or more, 1,700 people and six countries. You have acted on partial operating evidence with a decision you could undo, firming it up as better facts arrived, which is the discipline this seat depends on. Once a decision is taken you remain accountable for it, finance exceptions included, until each one is closed. Regulatory remediation, platform pivot and professionalisation will be weighed by the Group Chief Financial Officer; capital allocation should be at level 4, with risk judgement, FP&A forecasting, and controls and reporting each at level 3. You can set out an open gap without using uncertainty as a reason to delay, a commitment can be stopped before the countries reach agreement, and the outcome across all 12 months is yours.

Meeting the people who will rely on the numbers

The opening exchange is a video call, in confidence, with the Group Chief Financial Officer about how you would bring cash discipline into the planning cycle; it takes place in the opening week. The Board Chair joins you for a working session in week three. In the fifth week you sit in person with an executive panel representing each function, whose plans your reviews will test, and in the seventh the directors meet you as a full board. Our written view follows within two working days of each stage.