Interim Chief Quality and Service Officer — Delivery

Where quality, capacity and cost should meet

In many service operations, quality is decided by one team, capacity by another and cost by a third, and the front line inherits the contradictions. A technician is told to fix it right first time, finish more jobs per shift and use fewer parts, with nobody empowered to say which of the three gives way today. The Interim Chief Quality and Service Officer is appointed to make those trade-offs in one place, at the front line where they actually bite.

For 12 months the officer holds executive authority. That covers front-line decision rights, including which limits stay local, and the measures that govern spending, capacity and control. Each inherited commitment gets the officer's ruling. No proposal goes ahead while its cost or risk floats free of an owner, and no investment is made on a case that skips adoption, leans silently on other projects, or ignores what a failure would mean for service. The officer also signs off the shape of quality and service leadership and the path front-line problems take upward, and brokers any disagreement between the Country Managing Director and operating leaders while the spending is still undecided.

A year in which the trade-offs move to one table

Decision rights come first: by day ninety it should be settled who at the front line decides when quality, capacity and cost pull against each other, and on what basis. Around month nine quality and service measures should be reviewed alongside capacity and cost in a single front-line rhythm, rather than in three separate meetings that never compare notes. By month 12 the joined-up model should be running without interim support, with quality exceptions owned and steadily closing.

The measure of success is not a better quality score in isolation. It is a front line that can make a defensible call in the moment and explain it afterwards.

A service leader who has worked under pressure

Your operations experience should come from a business no smaller than $325 million in revenue, 700 people and five countries. Experience of a turnaround, of professionalisation and of buy-side M&A will count most, since each forces quality, capacity and cost into the same decision. A single front-line rhythm is the heart of the brief, so operating cadence counts most, at level 4. Quality and safety at level 3 is a given for a quality officer, and operating model and network footprint, also at level 3, let you see where capacity really sits.

You have taken operations decisions where waiting would have cost real money, and you have told a managing director about a contested downside in full. You can say which local habits deserve protecting and which should go, and you put the line in writing. When a quality problem cannot yet be explained, you contain it first and explain it second.

From the managing director to the boardroom

Four stages make up the process. The Country Managing Director meets you by video, in confidence, in week 1, to discuss the mandate and the front-line trade-offs at its heart. Week 3 is with the Risk Committee Chair, weighing quality and safety risk against capacity together. In week 5 executives who each lead a different function meet you in person. The full board closes things in week 7. After each stage, expect our feedback in writing within four working days.