Interim Senior Vice President, Operations — Delivery

The calls that land on an operations chief's desk

In utility services, the hardest operations decisions rarely announce themselves. They arrive as a request to take on one more contract, one more crew rotation, one more connection window. Each is reasonable on its own, and each draws on the same field teams, the same spares and the same control-room attention. The Interim Senior Vice President, Operations holds executive authority over those calls. You will draw the line between the field decisions regional operating managers can take alone and those that must reach your desk, and you will name the reliability data that decides where crews, spares and budget are sent. When an inherited commitment no longer earns its place, you decide whether it carries on, waits or stops, and you turn back any plan that quietly loads cost or risk onto a team that never agreed to carry it.

Two judgements will recur. The first is whether a reliability problem is a resourcing problem or a design problem; adding crews to a badly sequenced work programme usually buys a few weeks and then makes things worse. The second is when to say no to volume. A popular commitment can be the very one that consumes the capacity reliability needs, and ending it is often the most valuable thing an operations leader does in the first half of an interim mandate. You will also approve the leadership structure beneath you, set how problems travel upward, and settle disagreements with the people running the field before money is committed, not after.

A reliability standard built before the volume arrives

Across the 12 months, the order of the work matters more than its speed. In the first ninety days you and the Country Managing Director should agree a reliability baseline that both of you trust, the limits local leaders keep, and a person accountable for each exception that matters. No new volume should be accepted until that baseline exists. By around month nine, every operating commitment you inherited should have been examined against the reliability evidence and given a verdict, with the capacity freed by anything stopped visibly put to work elsewhere. By month 12, added volume should be running on a reliability standard that has been tested in practice, and the board should be reviewing operational exceptions and open decisions on a regular rhythm that you established.

Evidence of an operator who has done the unpopular thing

The operations you have run were substantial: revenue of $725 million or more, at least 1,600 people, and activity spread across two countries. Inside those operations you took calls on which every week of hesitation had a price you could put a number on. You can point to a moment when evidence moved crews, capital or management attention from one place to another, and to a well-liked commitment you ended because reliability needed the capacity it was consuming. When the reliability picture is incomplete, you can say so candidly to the Country Managing Director and still recommend a next step rather than another month of observation.

Your record in scale-up, professionalisation and succession will be examined closely, because the mandate draws on all three: growth that does not outrun the operation, disciplines that make performance repeatable, and leaders beneath you who can carry the standard once you leave. The capabilities that matter most are operating cadence at level 4, with operating model, network footprint and quality and safety each at level 3. Anyone who would hold off ending an operations commitment until each national head had blessed it, or who protects local discretion by reflex, will struggle here. Nor will it suit anyone who wants the influence of the post without owning its outcome for the full twelve months.

Meeting the Country Managing Director, then the board

First, in week one, the Country Managing Director talks with you confidentially over video about how you would put reliability ahead of growth without stalling it. Two weeks on, the Audit Committee Chair uses week three to work through with you how reliability would be evidenced and exceptions brought into the open. Week five brings you in person before a panel of executives, each leading a different function, who probe how your reliability choices would land in their own areas. The seventh week closes the process with the full board. Expect to hear back on each stage within three working days.